You wonder how many died immediately, suffocated by rubble, and how many over many hours through neglect. There is no infrastructure in Haiti. Unlike nearby Cuba, which is organizationally well-equipped to handle natural disasters, Haiti has no emergency aid network. There’s not even a military; that was disbanded during the last invasion, the one that followed the US-abetted uprising of thugs in 2004, the kidnapping of President Aristide (sent into exile in Africa), his replacement with Boniface Alexandre as a provisional president, and the subsequent election of Rene Preval. There’s no way of knowing what’s going on in that country, poorest in the hemisphere to begin with, now without power or water or meaningful news coverage.

Frankly, I don’t have much stomach for TV infortainment-news. I get physically ill hearing Bill O’Reilly’s screech, or watching Sean Hannity’s smirking choirboy face. CNN doesn’t appeal to me much more than Fox, which it emulates by constantly dumbing down every presentation and scrupulously avoiding questions of substance or historical perspective. The point is not to inform viewers but to make them feel, to stimulate, to sell the personalities of the anchors and compete with American Idol.

Don’t expect to hear Betty Nguyen on CNN affect a serious expression and say something like the following from the next few days: “Multiple authorities have now confirmed that the death toll in the January 12 earthquake in Haiti has now reached 200,000. Since population figures on Haiti range from 9.8 (World Bank) to 9.1 (CIA) that means over 2% (1 out of every 50 Haitians) has died. That would be like 6 million Americans (the whole population of the Bay Area) dying from one massive earthquake. This was a terrible disaster the country was completely unprepared for. Now let’s discuss why…”

No, that’s not going to happen. It’s easier not to discuss it and just bemoan the terrible poverty which is that country — as though it were somehow its mysterious fate as the only majority black, one-time majority slave state in the hemisphere — with appropriate clips, still visuals and soundtrack. There are awards waiting to be won here.

Although I rarely watch TV news, I saw a lot of the Haiti earthquake reports because I happened to be staying at my boyhood home in Honolulu on January 12 and for the following several days. My parents and other family members were there, all watching different TV stations, so I took in the range of coverage while keeping an eye on the internet. I was pleased that my father, who had a glioblastoma tumor removed from his brain over the summer and has been having some very difficult days, was able to understand what was going on and to empathize. For my part I thought the reportage extremely shallow. Why, I kept thinking, is there no analysis about why the country’s so messed up? But then of course, Rev. Pat Robertson provided an asinine answer, which became a news story in itself, of particular interest to people who believe in the existence of a devil. Robertson comes out looking like an ass (again) to people who already know what he is, while maintaining his power-base. Meanwhile no light’s been shed whatsoever on the history of Haiti and its unique degree of victimhood in this hemisphere.

In the long layover in the San Francisco airport the following Friday, I had little to do but watch T.J. Holmes and Nguyen on CNN handling the Haiti coverage. First they interviewed a fairly prominent Haitian-American man whose daughter had been missing but finally located in Haiti. The anchors offered congratulations on that. The father thanked everyone prolifically but said his daughter lacked food, water, clothing, and much had to be done, all of which is of course true. The father’s words were cut off when he appeared to want to thank a religious congregation by name too prolifically. Nguyen handled the situation deftly.

Then there was a segue from the living to the dead. Holmes interviewed the family of a 60 year old woman confirmed dead in Port-au-Prince. First Holmes posed the question frankly: with all these decomposing bodies piling up, and loved ones wanting to give them a proper burial, what can we do? And then he brought on the family to share photos and offer their personal story and implicit appeal for help in retrieving their mother’s remains within a day of so from the morgue and transporting them to the U.S.

The whole concept was bizarre. I wondered to myself, “Does T.J. realize what he’s talking about?”

I mean, here I am in the in San Francisco Airport, en route from Honolulu to Boston, my dad’s parents and grandparents buried in North Dakota, this very question current in my mind. Does Holmes, and do these good folks, have any idea what kind of money this requires, in the best of times? On top of that, absent any ground transport or infrastructure in Haiti, you’d have to hire a commando unit to go in, get the remains, and ship them back on a special flight…

T.J. shouldn’t have agreed to this cruel hope-stoking interview days before tens of thousands were bulldozed by necessity into mass graves. It was the worst sort of tabloid journalism. And again — no historical background, no reference to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, his movement, the coup against him in 1991, his restoration to power 1994 by the Clinton administration, his removal from power by the Bush administration in 2004. No analysis of the suffering and its causes, just a maudlin indulgence in the feeling, with an eye to the competition and its shameless exploitation of emotions.

I’m not a specialist on the history of Haiti, but I do think it important to look at things in perspective. This the mainstream media seems unable to do. Attractive young people with nice hair and attractive smiles increasingly deliver the copy. They are poised and can engage in pleasant light banter, their little quirks endearing them to specific market demographics and enhancing their contract extension prospects. These valuable products don’t need to be all that well-informed or even inquisitive about the recent past. If the story is “devastating earthquake in Haiti” they instinctively enter a “Let’s see, who can we interview that will bring out the human dimension of this tragedy?” mode. It doesn’t occur to them to ask, “Why does Haiti have no infrastructure to address natural disasters, after repeated invasions that were supposed to be for the Haitian people’s own good?”

I don’t blame them of course. It’s the editors who roll their eyes at such queries as “ideological.” And of course there are certain things television anchors can’t do, like say “U.S. imperialism” as though it were something real. (This is because they are employed by U.S. imperialists who prefer to see themselves as mere defenders of liberal capitalism and who when supporting wars against Iraq and other countries based on lies insist that their own investments have nothing to do with their journalistic viewpoint.) But current reportage could outline Haiti’s history just a bit better, from a dispassionate apolitical point of view.

African slaves rose up against French colonialists from 1791 to 1803 and established the only black republic in the hemisphere (the Haitian gene pool is about 95% African). That republic was subjected to the equivalent of contemporary sanctions by the world’s leading nations. (U.S. leaders feared that to recognize Haiti would encourage slave revolts and only recognized it — that is, the Union recognized it — in 1862.) French capital dominated throughout the nineteenth century; in exchange for diplomatic recognition, Haiti had to pay France 150 million gold francs in compensation for “lost property” (that is, the citizens of the hemisphere’s second republic, who had once been slaves and had won their freedom through violent struggle, subsequently had to compensate their former masters for the cost of their freedom — up until 1947.) In the early twentieth century German families intermarried into the Haitian mulatto elite and in the period leading up to the First World War the putative German threat and political instability in Haiti produced excuses for an invasion and U.S. occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1934. Since then the U.S. has ultimately called the shots.

I’d like to hear a CNN anchor mention in passing, “Of course you know the U.S. occupied Haiti for two decades in the 20th century.” Or hear him or her add casually, “Maybe 3000 rebels were killed in the uprising against forced labor imposed by Gendarmerie commandant Smedley Butler.” Wouldn’t this moment, with attention focused on Haiti, be the ideal moment to visit some of that history?

Maybe it’s a good time to introduce the term, to those who haven’t heard it, Tonton Macoutes, the name of the vicious paramilitary police who killed about 30,000 people under the regimes of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier (1957-86), who ruled with U.S. support. Or explain how a mass movement led by former Roman Catholic parish priest Aristide could win 67% of the vote in the internationally monitored 1990 elections, only to fall in a military coup against him the following year. (Following this a CIA contact formed the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti or FRAPH, an anti-Lavalas death-squad.) I’ve heard no discussion in the mainstream media of why Bill Clinton restored Aristide to power in 1994, despite reservations about his “left” politics (or perhaps because of some political deal) or why George W. Bush toppled him in 2004.

Aristide, reelected with an overwhelming majority in 2001 when his Lavalas movement won 80% of local and parliamentary seats, was confronted by a rebellion of U.S.-backed thugs in 2004 after (as he tells it) he refused to agree to the privatization of the state-owned telephone and electricity enterprises. On Feb. 29, he was forced by U.S. soldiers to board a plane into exile not knowing the destination (Central African Republic), finally settling in South Africa. In repeated phone calls to prominent U.S. citizens, including legislators, he declared he’d been the victim of a kidnapping. The Bush administration via Colin Powell (who told us about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction) assured us that, no, Aristide resigned voluntarily. (We were expected at the time to suppose Aristide confused rather than Powell outright duplicitous.)

Following the removal of Aristide the U.S., which had had a strained relationship with France due to French opposition to the attack on Iraq, persuaded Haiti’s former colonial master to join in a re-invasion of the country together to restore order. (The French have a naval presence in the Caribbean — Martinique and Guyene — and were happy to use the occasion to make up with the U.S. as of Feb. 2004. The U.S. paid them back by condoning their attack on the Ivory Coast, another former French colony, that November.) Now there’s a UN-validated “peacekeeping” force which, having disbanded the former military, which was accused of engaging in summary executions, is itself accused of engaging in summary executions. President Preval, a former Aristide ally, seems not so much unpopular as powerless.

In the generally vapid commentary on Haiti I’ve seen, the topic of the Revolution has come up, most prominently in connection with Robertson’s remark that the devil made them do it. That event, occurring incrementally from 1791 to 1803, culminated with a revolt against Napoleon Bonaparte’s effort re-introduce slavery into the colony. (Robertson with characteristic ignorance mentions “Napoleon the Third or whatever” confusing the nephew with the uncle.) It’s sad that that revolutionary upheaval isn’t being discussed more positively. It shows how the power of the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789, that mother of modern revolutions for which the American Revolution was a mere prelude, could resonate around the world.

In May 1791, the National Assembly in Paris voted to grant French citizenship to free men of color. White leaders in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) refused to accept the decision, occasioning not just indignation from the mostly mulatto freemen but a general slave revolt. (Vodou priests played some leading roles; this might explain the Christian vilification of the revolution as somehow demonic.) When the Spanish and British, in league with white planters, invaded the colony in 1793, the French were obliged to declare an end to slavery. Thereafter Toussaint L’Ouverture, a general and self-educated former slave, consolidated power as governor, his demands for autonomy resulting in arrest and imprisonment in France where he died in 1802.

Restoration of direct French rule meant moves towards the reintroduction of slavery. A rebellion headed by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had been an officer in the French army, met with victory over the French at the Battle of Vertières in 1803. The next year Dessalines proclaimed the Republic of Haiti (from the indigenous Arawak name). But taking his cue from Napoleon, he soon had himself crowned Emperor. A wide range of leaders bridged the period to Papa Doc.

Why does Haiti occupy a place of almost unique humiliation within the world-system? I can’t believe it’s cultural or religious in the main. Surely the exploitation of religiosity has kept people down — as it has everywhere in the Americas, from square one. But issues of ownership, labor and capital, position of the nation in the world system, are key to understanding.

Mainstream television news doesn’t ask any key questions because the answers, clear and honest, would just be too painful to those in power, to whom the news editors must defer because they buy the ads that make it possible for you to read the news. (They “bring you the news.” So since they bring it to you, why shouldn’t they interpret, sanitize and explain it for you all along the way?)

We have here two percent of the people of a neighboring island nation dead from a natural disaster. Our corporate media tease us with the suggestion that it might be due to the people’s voodoo-satanic tendencies. Or maybe it’s just tectonic plate interactions. (Hey it’s a big country, room for LOTS of opinions). Meanwhile they steer away from anything resembling real discussion of Haitian history.

Anderson Cooper rescues a boy, Sanjay Gupta a girl. Both join together to “help a young child in danger” in Haiti.” That’s great when the headline can combine promotion for these well-loved CNN figures and for the general project of Haiti earthquake relief. But it also looks a little contrived, frankly. Or is that just cynical me?

Can’t we do better than this? If people are moved to donate to earthquake relief, shouldn’t they know why things are so messed up in Haiti? Aren’t they owed some journalism?

Now the main target is Mehsud’s successor, 30ish Hakimullah Mehsud. If and when he is killed (along with some civilians, if precedent is followed), there will be another TTP leader, another main target for the drone strikes. And when he’s killed, another. Although the Afghan Taliban has officially distanced itself from al-Qaeda, offering last month to provide a “legal guarantee” that it would not intervene in foreign countries after resuming power, this is precisely the cycle of violence al-Qaeda wishes to encourage throughout the Muslim world.

It is doing so successfully from the Swat Valley to southern Yemen and has infinite potential to spread the jihad elsewhere if the U.S. continues to swallow the bait.

Every expert on Pakistan notes that the drone strikes on the country have outraged public opinion and damaged the president, Asif Ali Zardari. Zardari, responding to mass demonstrations, and protests by the legislature and newspaper editors, has repeatedly stated that “the U.S. actions should remain on the Afghan side of the border” (that is to say, the U.S. should respect Pakistani sovereignty and international law).

He recently told a delegation of U.S. legislators including Sen. John McCain that “drone attacks on Pakistani territory undermined the national consensus” against Islamist militants. McCain responded, “The drone strikes are part of an overall set of tactics which make up the strategy for victory and they have been very effective.” (That is to say: Our strategy for victory trumps your petty claim to national independence.)

Last week Zardari told U.S. special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke that the drone strikes were “a cause of great concern” and urged a policy review by the Obama administration. Asked by the press how the strikes were affecting relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, Holbrooke was both coy and condescending. “I am limited in what I can talk about on this subject, but sometimes policies … have costs and benefits,” he said. In other words: Yes, our violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty is infuriating its people, a potential downside, but on the bright side, that violation has resulted in some militants’ deaths. The same logic as McCain’s.

Pakistani officials have been protesting the attacks for a long time. Speaking in parliament in November 2008, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani denounced the most recent attack, which had occurred at Bannu district in the northwest. This was the first such attack outside the border tribal areas. “These attacks are adding to our problems,” he declared. “They are intolerable and we do not support them.” At that time Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi summoned the U.S. ambassador to once again protest U.S. violations of Pakistan’s sovereignty, and to declare that such attacks were not helping counter-terrorism efforts. During the same month the Pakistani Army held a training exercise in using surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns to shoot down drones. This was widely interpreted as a move to pressure the government to stand up to the U.S.

All this took place during November 2008, the month of Obama’s election, during a year when the Bush administration executed 17 drone attacks on Pakistan reportedly killing 165 people. (There’d been seven between 2004 and 2007.) Perhaps Pakistanis hoped that there’d be a change under Obama.

Early on in his administration, we came to associate global cowboy bullying with George W. Bush. Widely perceived as simplistic in his thinking, he divided the complex world into two, announcing after 9-11 “You’re either for us or against us,” and demanding fealty as security against attack. Pakistan’s leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf, an ally of the Taliban for his own geostrategic reasons, was ordered to sever ties with the organization and cooperate with the U.S. “War on Terror” or “get bombed back to the Stone Age.” The general obeyed, was paid well for his efforts, but also paid a political price. A poll taken in September 2007 showed him trailing Osama bin Laden in approval ratings in Pakistan, 46 to 38%.

Zardari, president since September 2008, represents a return to civilian rule and has a broader political base than Musharraf, who had seized power in a military coup in 1999. He’s the husband of former president Benazir Bhutto, assassinated by terrorists during her presidential campaign in December 2007, and can count on the support of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the largest party in the country. But he too must comply with Washington’s wishes, and Washington has not become less demanding or more respectful with the advent of Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama is in some ways (style, certainly) the antithesis of Bush. His smooth Cairo speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 was designed to counter the cowboy-outlaw image and portray the U.S. as a respectful partner of Muslim nations, capable of self-reflection and self-criticism. He pointedly noted that the invasion of Iraq had been “a war of choice” (without however drawing the obvious conclusion that it was a war in violation of international law whose architects should be prosecuted). But the key passage in the dignified address was this one, which could have been penned by a Bush speechwriter:

Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al Qaeda and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet Al Qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people…These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with.

Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan… We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.

Here the candidate of Change (champion of a system that does not change) trotted out the same old tired myth that launched a thousand others in the period since: the notion that al-Qaeda = the Taliban. That is surely an “opinion to be debated,” and if debated those conflating the two will be easily exposed as manipulative, fear-mongering deceivers. The U.S. and its allies are not fighting in Afghanistan those who killed 3000 on 9-11 but Pashtun nationalists indignant that their country’s been invaded and occupied. U.S. intelligence quietly confirms that al-Qaeda has been driven from Afghanistan and any presence now is “minor.” What the U.S. faces now are new enemies that it multiplies each day through its behavior.

This is true in Pakistan too. Indeed, the U.S. by its bombing of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border (the “Durand Line” legacy of British colonialism ignored by the Pashtuns who straddle it) midwifed the birth of the Pakistani Taliban movement. That has produced huge problems for the Pakistani state and its military for which U.S. officials show little understanding or empathy.

From the point of view of the former, India occupying over half of Muslim Kashmir rather than their former Talib allies constitutes the primary threat to Pakistan’s national security. But the real issue is not the legitimacy of Pakistan’s claim to all of Kashmir or Indian counter-claims but the arrogance of a foreign power preaching to the Pakistanis where the real threats to themselves reside and demanding cooperation in confronting those threats. The Bush and Obama administrations have paid lip-service to the idea that “the Kashmir problem must be resolved,” much as Obama has insisted, in words, that Israeli settlers must be withdrawn from the occupied West Bank where they remain comfortably.

But then officials blithely suggest that giant India, with which the U.S. has signed an agreement to sell nuclear reactors and equipment and is developing a military alliance (indeed urging it to become a “superpower” to challenge China and dominate the Indian Ocean), is no problem. Pakistan, they insist, ought to redeploy tens of thousands of troops from Kashmir to the Afghan border. The message remains the same as it was during the Bush administration: You’re either for us or against us. Jump aboard our project; make our war your war and leave your other petty regional concerns (so difficult for Americans to understand) aside. And if with each missile we lob onto your sovereign territory without your permission and against your people’s will we exacerbate the problem we’ve created, join with us in suffering the consequences.

Or rather, bear the great bulk of those consequences yourselves! Over 7000 civilians dead (according to one report, 90% of the 700 killed by drone strikes in 2009 were civilians). 3000 soldiers and police killed, over 13000 militants (reportedly) killed, three and a half million people displaced, puritanical Islamism on the rise throughout the country. Even if the U.S. absorbed the entire $35 billion price tag for the war, the socio-economic results have been disastrous. Hence as Zardari rather timidly understates it: “a cause of great concern.” U.S. attacks have indeed undermined any “national consensus” and instead produced deep fissures in Pakistani society (rather likes the increasingly frequent drone attacks are doing in Yemen).

And the Obama administration, as Holbrooke’s dismissive remarks make clear, just doesn’t care. A very conventional president of an imperialist country with a savage history of wars against “communism” (i.e., to defend and expand capitalism), wars to expand empire, wars for control of resources and markets (which he defended in his Nobel Peace Prize speech as wars that “helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms”) Obama weighs “costs and benefits” and calculates that the suffering of the Pakistani people and the stresses imposed on the Islamabad government are worth the occasional announcement that we slew one militant per 10 or so “collateral” civilians. (Perhaps 100 civilians per Baitullah Mehsud-quality hit.)

Obama’s much keener to fight the war in what his advisors call “Af-Pak” than was his bellicose predecessor. (Again: just 24 drone attacks on Pakistan during the entire Bush administration, at least 54 so far since Obama took office.) It’s his war now, as key to his legacy as the health care reform bill. Reliant upon unmanned aerial vehicles and remote sensing to fire missiles at ground targets, it’s a war without U.S. casualties and thus no apparent immediate risk. But rest assured, the repeated, naked, callous violation of a proud, populous, nuclear-armed Muslim nation’s sovereignty will produce some blowback over time.

You cannot deliberately cultivate hatred through your actions and expect it to just dry up and blow away. Human beings don’t operate that way. They react. Until there’s real change (not in the face on the system, but of the system itself) the cycle will continue.

Sept. 21: Washington Post publishes article by Bob Woodward with excerpts from Gen. McChrystal’s “Initial Assessment” with its warning of “mission failure” if his troop deployment request is rejected. Anonymous White House official responds that military is trying to pressure Obama on the issue. One official criticizes chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen for suggesting the war in Afghanistan would “probably need more forces.” Obama tells press conference that Afghan government’s legitimacy may have been so undermined that a counterinsurgency strategy will not succeed and states we should not “think that by sending more troops, we’re automatically going to make Americans safe.”

Sept. 27: Washington Post publishes Woodward interview with national security advisor Gen. James Jones in which he questions McChrystal’s argument that al-Qaeda would be moving back into Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan from havens in Pakistan.

Oct. 1: McChrystal gives a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London in which he argues, “[W]hen the Taliban has success, that provides sanctuary from which al-Qaeda can operate transnationally.” This implies that the Taliban needn’t reacquire state power to provide sanctuary for al-Qaeda and provides a broader justification for continued “counterinsurgency.” (He was rebuked the next day in a face-to-face meeting with Obama in Copenhagen for his bluntness, and criticized implicitly by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and national security advisor James Jones for stepping outside the chain of command with his comments.)

Oct. 4: New York Times reports “senior administration officials” stating that Obama’s national security team was “arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States.” One of the officials interviewed says explicitly that the administration was now defining the Taliban as a group that “does not express ambitions of attacking the United States,” that the Taliban were aligned with al-Qaeda “mainly on the tactical front,” and could not be defeated militarily because they were too deeply entrenched in Afghan society.

But in the next few weeks Gates works feverishly with chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, McChrystal and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (against Vice President Joe Biden) to promote a plan to “protect” about 10 population centers with increased troop strength, leaving Special Forces and drones to cope with “insurgents” elsewhere. This will be sold as a “compromise” plan (out of four) and the announcement of the details left to the soaring oratory of the president whom, Gates knews well, wants to be seen as a uniting, judicious figure on the right side of his national security team.

Nov. 11: the national security apparatus led by Gates, Mullen and Clinton, coalesce around the plan for 30,000 more troops.

Porter points out that Obama previously rejected his own surge rationale, as expressed in his speech Tuesday night—that is the national security rationale. The escalation is for a “vital national interest,” he told his audience of cadets, warning them that more attacks on the U.S. from Afghanistan “are now being planned as I speak.”

Does he really believe his own rhetoric? I think he has “coalesced” around an argument crafted by his national security apparatus, which isn’t really concerned with national security or interest (in the sense of your security or interest or mine), but the expansion and projection of a kind of malevolent power and control that just shouldn’t be.

What is for sure being planned as we speak is the ongoing attack on Afghanistan by the U.S. eight years after Arabs, not Afghans, crashed planes into New York City and Washington DC and after the Arabs have all been driven out of Afghanistan.

It doesn’t make sense to a lot of people.

Senior White House officials know that the Taliban doesn’t threaten the U.S. But somehow the military won in this struggle, and the McChrystal line of argument (fear mongering) won out too. Obama is part of a system he cannot change had he ever wanted to, the imperialist president of an imperialist country deeply entrenched in an imperialist war. Such wars can never be justified to the people frankly, for what they’re worth, but have to be based on lies and supported by fear.

On November 10 Presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that anybody who says Obama has made a decision “doesn’t have in all honesty the slightest idea what they’re talking about. The president’s yet to make a decision” about troop levels. I read that as an effort to encourage the antiwar folks who continue to think kindly of Obama that just maybe he’ll do the right thing and withdraw.

The fact that former general and current U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry recommended against a buildup of forces given the widespread corruption in the Hamid Karzai regime in a memo last week, and that the memo was allowed to leak to the press, may also be a sop to the rational forces calling for an end to the war.

Obama says he’s angrier that Robert Gates about the leak and wants whoever is responsible fired. But the fact that Obama says he will make the decision “with a few weeks” and that NATO has announced that its regular Brussels meeting to discuss troop levels in Afghanistan has been postponed from November 23 to sometime next month suggests that the president may indeed be experiencing some internal conflict about this war he has repeatedly called a “war of necessity.”

That’s really been Obama’s defining foreign policy thesis. For a man without “foreign policy experience” (which of course from a common-sense point of view is not a bad thing) Obama felt from the get-go that he needed to balance his stand against the Iraq War, which was never really more than objection to a “strategic blunder,” with a macho, ringing defense of the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity”–the war that George Bush blew by diverting troops and resources to Iraq.

So long as Afghanistan was the Good War to Iraq’s Bad War that may have been a rational political strategy. As recently as his Cairo speech in June Obama told the world that while the Iraq War had been a “war of choice” (a significant admission for the head of state of the aggressor nation in a still ongoing war) Afghanistan was a war of necessity caused by the 9-11 attacks. But since then his own intelligence services have assured him that al-Qaeda has left Afghanistan and U.S. forces aren’t fighting the 9-11 perpetrators there. The U.S. forces and diminishing numbers of demoralized NATO and other allies fight Pashtun nationalists fired up by jihadist spirit. They have gotten stronger with each passing year of the eight year war, and more effective in killing U.S. troops unclear about their mission.

Obama could back off from his defining foreign policy thesis and say, “I was wrong. Actually this war wasn’t necessary at all and I’m pulling out.” He could point out the obvious: that it is an inherited conflict, not his war; that it has lost the support of the American people; that the Afghan regime for which the U.S. fights is hopelessly corrupt and unpopular; that the Afghans want the foreigners out, with Karzai himself calling for a timetable for withdrawal; that the war is dangerously destabilizing nuclear Pakistan and causing the people there as well as Afghanistan to hate the U.S. which is just very dangerous for everyone concerned.

It would be so easy, and there would be enormous support for a clear statement of a withdrawal plan. But it’s widely predicted that Obama will bow to the demand of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for tens of thousands of more troops, raising the issue of who really runs this country and what issues are really involved in Afghanistan. Does the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean, bypassing both Russia and Iran, have anything to do with it?

All the wrestling with the arguments about the absence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the increase in U.S. forces actually strengthening the Taliban and the distastefulness of having American soldiers dying for Karzai’s bogus regime ends when the pale cast of thought turns to serious imperialist geopolitics. Forgive my language but Obama is a traditional bourgeois politician who with his State Department identifies corporate U.S. interests as “national” interests and probably can be persuaded that they’re worth fighting for. Or rather, using U.S. troops to fight and die for.

Whether he gives McChrystal the 40,000 he wants or a smaller force, it will be doomed to contribute to the current 922 military fatality figure. Soon 1000 will have died fighting illiterate tribesman deeply angered at their presence in their valleys which have resisted countless ill-considered incursions for over 2300 years. Will the standard-bearer of change and hope still be pacing his office, wrestling with the question then?

[N]ow we are focusing on the mass movement… [N]ow we [can] really practice what we have been preaching. That means the fusion of the strategy of PPW [Protracted People’s War] and the tactic of general insurrection. What we have been doing since 2005 is the path of preparation for general insurrection through our work in the urban areas and our participation in the coalition government.

– Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai, interview with the Britain-based World People’s Resistance Movement, October 26, 2009

Today (November 1) Nepal’s Maoists initiate, with torch rallies in Kathmandu, a mass movement to bring down the regime. This is the regime that succeeded the one their chair Prachanda headed as prime minister from August 2008 to May 2009–a compromise arrangement, always understood to be temporary and transitional, that collapsed when the Nepali Army refused to take orders from the Maoist prime minister.

Prime Minister Prachanda, noting the obvious (that the Maoists’ suspension of the People’s War and participation in parliamentary processes had not really given them state power), might have then ordered the resumption of the war. Instead, the first elected Maoist national leader made a surprising (I think even shrewdly Gandhian) move of resigning his post, while his party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) redoubled its efforts to organize support among the urban masses of Kathmandu.

The Maoists claimed that acquiring top posts in the government following the toppling of the monarchy in 2008 was less important than two other tasks: achieving goals in the composition of the new constitution and building that mass urban movement. The “Prachanda Path” has always been about combining Mao’s theory of People’s War (surrounding the cities from the countryside) with Lenin’s model of the urban uprising—the October Revolution.

As of November 2005 the Maoists controlled about 80% of the country. They surrounded Kathmandu Valley but felt incapable of taking it militarily. Meanwhile King Gyanendra, deeply unpopular, had made himself even more widely despised by dissolving the parliament and arresting mainstream political leaders. The Maoists cut a deal with the legal political parties to coordinate actions to bring down the king. They agreed to eventually lay down their arms under UN supervision, in return for the other parties’ acceptance of new elections for a Constituent Assembly to author a new constitution. In the April 2008 elections, Maoists won 220 of 575 seats in the assembly, double the figure of their nearest competitors. International observers such as Jimmy Carter verified that the elections were free and fair. There is no question the Maoists have a mass base.

And there’s no question there are real limits to what you can accomplish following the normal rules. Hence “the tactic of general insurrection.”

The U.S. State Department has always seen the Maoists as “terrorists” and even keeps them on the terror list now. That’s not because they’ve used violence to overthrow a social order that inflicts misery in subtle and not so subtle, violent and not so violent ways every day as the Nepali state presides or looks on indifferently. “Terrorism” in the State Department’s lexicon refers to anything that terrifies State Department officials, and the prospect of the red flag flying over Mt. Everest is one of their nightmares. But the fact is they do believe in the violent overthrow of oppressive institutions, they do believe the revolution isn’t by any means over yet, and they do have a program for seizure of power through what Bhattarai terms “the tactic of general insurrection.”

Knowing this, U.S. Charge d’Affaires in Kathmandu Jeffrey Moon called on Prachanda at his home in the city Oct. 28 to express U.S. concern about these upcoming protests. He was apparently told that the Maoists remain committed to the peace process and the drafting of a new constitution. But suspension of the guerrilla war is one thing. General insurrection centered in the city is another. And the People’s War and the urban insurrection may connect at some point in the near future, just as the government of neighboring India undertakes an assault on the Maoist movement that has come to control vast regions of that county.

I have no idea what the outcome may be. But history is clearly not over, Communist movements are clearly not dead, and the ideal of classless society has clearly not vanished in societies where class oppression is most intense.

Commander of U.S. and “international” forces Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has pledged since assuming his post in June to cut back on the air strikes that have so alienated Afghan public opinion and to make “safeguarding the lives of Afghan civilians” his priority. There had been too many mistakes under his predecessor Gen. McKiernan, such as the attack that killed 47 people walking to a wedding July 6, 2008. The Afghan president, sounding less and less like a U.S. puppet, and parliament had become increasingly vocal in their opposition to the bombing and unacceptable civilian death toll. Some change of tactics was necessary as a concession to Afghan nationalism and mounting impatience with the occupation.

This incident, coming at a time of serious friction between Washington and the Karzai regime, obviously worries the U.S. commander. Gen. McChrystal called Karzai Friday night promising to conduct an investigation. He visited the bombing site, met with wounded civilians at the local hospital, and made a statement on TV and radio declaring that “nothing is more important than the safety and protection of the Afghan people. I take this possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously.” He promised them too an investigation.

But as a Los Angeles Times piece on the Kunduz incident notes, “It is not uncommon for such incidents to end with disagreement between Afghan and Western officials about the scope and nature of civilian casualties.” What will this investigation conclude, and will it satisfy the Afghan public?

Here are fatality figures from the incident posited by different sources that I have seen to date:

Friday, Sept. 4: Kunduz MP Moin Marastial announced, “We don’t know how many people died exactly because the bodies of Taliban and locals were taken away after midnight, but it is definitely more than 120 people in the area.” He was referring to the video feed that had been analyzed by the US Air Force as showing 120 people around the tankers just before the strike.

Kim Sengupta in Kabul reporting from Kabul for the London Independent reported “95 people, dozens of them civilians” had been killed in the strike.

Kunduz provincial governor Engineer Mohammad Omar stated that there were an “estimated 90 dead,” of whom 45 were Taliban fighters including local commander Mullah Abdul Rahman. But he also said “most” of the dead were militants, judging by the number of charred pieces of Kalashnikov rifles found at the site.

Kunduz provincial police chief stated 65 Taliban fighters had been killed in the strike.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told al-Jazeera that as many as 90 civilians, who had come out to take fuel from the trucks, had been killed.

Saturday, Sept. 5: Kunduz local government spokesman Mohammad Yawar inexplicably revised the total figure downward, stating more than 70 people had been killed.

Gov. Omar fixed the total figure at 72, stating there were only 30 insurgents, including the Taliban commander Rahman and four Chechens. But he suggested the others were “probably fighters or relatives.”

Yawar stated that at least 45 of the 70 he now calculated as total killed had been militants.

Sept. 6: Gov. Omar told German press that there were only 54 dead, only 6 of them civilians.

AP reported that German forces claimed 57 Taliban had been killed in the Kunduz bombing attack.

Washington Post revealed that a NATO fact-finding team had visited the site Saturday and concluded “that about 125 people were killed in the bombing, at least two dozen of whom — but perhaps many more — were not insurgents.”

Human rights group Afghan Rights Monitor announced, on the basis of interviews with 15 villagers, that that only a dozen gunmen died and 60-70 villagers had been killed. It indicated that they may have been Taliban supporters (which might allow the authorities to conflate them “insurgents” in justifying their incineration). “Even if all the victims were supporters of the Taliban,” stated the organization’s director Ahmad Sami Yawar, “the fact that most of them were unarmed and were not engaged in any combat activity does not warrant their mass killing.”

So who to believe? It certainly looks as though local officials have scurried to produce a minimal civilian death count. (How did Gov. Omar get from 45 to 6 civilian dead in a few days?) The fact that the bodies have been buried expeditiously in accordance with Muslim law may make it easier to do that. And if, as Gov. Omar as noted, the area is “under Taliban control” and local people likely supportive or cooperative, it may be possible to blur the line between legitimate Taliban target and any local adult male, especially if he’s sporting a Kalashnikov. (There are more of these than men in Afghanistan.)

A Taliban spokesman declares that the group escaped any losses, and that all the dead are non-combatants, a claim as implausible as that of one Asmatullah at Kunduz Hospital who told AFP, “All the dead were Taliban.”

Today’s Washington Post gives some insight into the mentality of local officials in Kunduz. Greeting the McChrystal party when they came to investigate the air strike incident, a key local official who declined to be named declared, “I don’t agree with the rumor that there were a lot of civilian casualties. Who goes out at 2 in the morning for fuel? These were bad people, and this was a good operation.”

In other words, the boy on the donkey who rides out to siphon gas and gets incinerated as a result deserves it.

Kunduz provincial council chairman Ahmadullah Wardak told McChrystal that NATO forces in the area need to be acting “more strongly” and bombing more. “If we do three more operations like was done the other night, stability will come to Kunduz,” he told the general. “If people do not want to live in peace and harmony, that’s not our fault. We’ve been too nice to the thugs.”

Given that mentality, one might expect a whitewash as McChrystal undertakes his promised investigation of this incident. On the other hand there are forces within Afghanistan, including around Karzai who has his own contradictions with Washington, who may wish to use this episode to embarrass their patrons even as the latter accuse them of corruption.

“Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else,” he told ABC’s This Week in an interview broadcast Sunday. “Whether we agree or not, they’re entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that’s going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed. If the Netanyahu government decides to take a course of action different than the one being pursued now, that is their sovereign right to do that. That is not our choice,” he declared.

The statement is presented in logically abstract terms. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do what’s in its interest regardless of what “we” think, surely. How very reasonable–magnanimous, even, coming from the mouth of the vice-president of the superpower that’s in the last eight years brutally imposed its will on two sizable Southwest Asian countries.

But to test Biden’s universalist logic imagine yourself in 1939, substitute Germany for Israel and Poland for Iran and ask whether “any sovereign nation is” really “entitled to do that.”

Of course Israel doesn’t have any “sovereign right” to attack Iran! And Biden’s implied distaste for the attack (“That is not our choice”), which may presage a calculated distancing from an action in the future, doesn’t undo the fact that he explicitly validates such action here.

They’re entitled to do it, says Joe. Just as presumably they’re entitled to remain outside the nuclear nonproliferation treaty regime, and produce and stockpile the only nuclear weapons in the Middle East, while claiming that the Iranian nuclear program (begun under U.S. encouragement under the Shah) can only have military intentions and can only be designed to produced a “nuclear Holocaust” to destroy the Jews.

Just as presumably they’re entitled to deploy vast resources to pressure the U.S. government to bomb Iran for them. (But no worry about the impact on U.S. foreign policy. “There is no pressure,” says Joe, “from any nation that’s going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed.” What he really means is: There’s actually a whole shitload of pressure from Israel on us to bomb Iran. But we might not do that. Because Obama thinks that the Israeli-demanded attack on Iran, like the assault on Iraq, might be a “strategic blunder.”)

One could argue, of course, that in positing Netanyahu’s “sovereign right” to bomb Iran, a nation which has not attacked another in modern times, Biden is just shooting off his famous mouth again. But there are at least two reasons his comments should be taken very seriously.

First of all, there is obviously much conflict within the U.S. power structure over the wisdom of a U.S. attack on Iran. The Israel Lobby demanding one may have suffered a defeat at the hands of the Pentagon, which sees such an attack as complicating the imbroglios it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan (and down the road in Pakistan?), and the intelligence community which knows that Iran does not possess a nuclear weapons program threatening the world.

Secondly, the state of Israel continues to depict the Islamic Republic of Iran as an “existential” threat to itself, while threatening to attack it with missiles if the U.S. does not do so. The Bush administration always endorsed Israel’s vilification campaign and conceded the possibility that it might act “on its own” (as though it could really do so without a green light from Washington). Dick Cheney told Don Imus on MSNBC in January 2005, “Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel [sic (disinformation)], the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.” He implied that if the U.S. didn’t take action, the Israelis would be justified in doing so.

This remains the U.S. position under the Obama administration. And having decided for geopolitical reasons to adopt a tougher line on Israel’s illegal settlements on the West Bank, Washington is perhaps particularly disinclined to deter Israel should it opt to create the mess of which Cheney spoke. “That was not our choice,” it will say.

He had of course declared Iraq a war of choice on the campaign trail. But to do so in this international forum was a little surprising, as it could be read as an implicit acknowledgment that the war was a violation of international law. (What is a war of choice after all but a war crime?) But in Cairo Obama — who declines to investigate Bush era officials for war crimes — merely pronounced some bromides about seeking wisdom along with power from now on and vowed to henceforth be a “partner” of Iraq rather than its “patron.”

Obama’s strongest criticism of the Iraq War during the campaign was that it was a “strategic blunder,” and course it would be rather too much to expect a U.S. president to denounce any U.S. imperialist war in truly heartfelt fashion. But he might in Cairo have returned to a theme he broached in October 2002 during the buildup to the war, in his famous Chicago “antiwar speech”:

“What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99591469

He might have noted that this particular war of choice was largely a war based on lies playing upon anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes disseminated as “intelligence” by neocons like the aforementioned Wolfowitz, Perle, “Scooter” Libby, and Douglas Feith whose “ideological agenda” involved (and continues to involve) “regime change” throughout Muslim Southwest Asia. It was a war to advance the interests of corporate America and the oil companies (although they didn’t necessarily drive it) — and also to create a better security environment for Israel so central to those neocon “ideological agendas.”

The war was justified in part by a false association between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden conjured up by Feith’s “Office of Special Plans.” The very idea that the secular Baathist regime of Saddam would have had a close working relationship with the fanatically Salafist al-Qaeda only made sense to those with highly simplistic views of the Islamic world (or those knowing better but trying to use those with such views). It assumed a readiness to conflate altogether dissimilar Muslims and a racist essentialization of Arabs.

Simply put, the al-Qaeda-Iraq link cynically exploited stereotypes. In that sense it and the entire “war on terror” are indeed anti-Muslim as often charged. Obama can declare as he did in Cairo (to applause), “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” But if he makes no fundamental changes in U.S. policy his words ring hollow.

Those who lied about Iraq-bin Laden links also lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. They provided the disinformation behind the carefully timed references by top officials in the fall of 2002 to a “mushroom cloud over New York City” designed to terrify the American people. (Libby was on the White House Iraq Group that came up with that “let’s hope the smoking gun’s not a mushroom cloud over New York” sales pitch.)

Are there not similarities between that propaganda and the “nuclear Holocaust” propaganda of hysteria currently being circulated by those praying for the U.S. to bomb Iran on behalf of Israel? What is Obama doing to fight the AIPAC crazies working overtime to thwart the U.S. intelligence community’s actual, empirical assessment that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program and to rather impose their hypothesis that it most definitely has one?

And speaking of “negative stereotypes,” what is Obama doing to challenge the preposterous notion that the Iranian leadership is prepared to use nukes on Israel, knowing that that would mean massive retaliation against Iran? The argument is that the mullahs so hate the Jews that they are rushing to produce nukes in order to use one against the Jewish state armed with a couple hundred of its own, consciously inviting the inevitable nuclear response from Israel and/or the U.S., provoking the annihilation of millions of their own people.

They will willingly accept that toll, the argument continues, because the Shiite Islam of the Iranian mullahs, with its peculiar martyrdom complex, makes them indifferent to this apocalyptic result of their planned attack. It’s a nonsensical caricature of a regime that told the Bush administration in 2003 it was prepared to accept the Arab League Peace Initiative to Israel, allows the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel representation in the Majlis, and leads a country that has attacked no other in modern times.

Obama: “Make no mistake . . . No debate . . . Afghanistan a War of Necessity”

In any case, turning in Cairo to the war in Afghanistan, Obama contrasted it with that in Iraq as a war of necessity. It was and is a clear-cut, righteous cause beyond debate. He lectured the Muslim world:

We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet al-Qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with.

Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.

The lack of creativity here was striking. This could have been written by Bush “Axis-of-Evil” speech writer and Richard Perle associate David Frum in early 2002. This was emphatically not an explanation for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2009 but rather an obvious example of obfuscation. In declaring Afghanistan a war of necessity Obama failed to really establish links between the 9-11 attackers and the Taliban. He didn’t show that those engaging in armed struggle against the regimes in power in Afghanistan and Pakistan today are really determined to “kill as many Americans as they possibly can,” or if they have become so determined, where and why. One might say he set up a straw man, a straw jihadi, for GI Joe to attack.

Surely the Taliban nurtured al-Qaeda after 1996; the families of Mullah Omar and bin Laden even established marriage ties. But the Taliban were not bin Laden’s initial hosts in Afghanistan upon his return to the country from Sudan. The Taliban did not set up bin Laden in his camps; these date back to the 1980s when he was working with the CIA. The Taliban was a conservative Pashtun-based xenophobic Sunni Muslim movement rooted in the Pakistani madrassas attended by Afghan refugees. Formed in the early 1990s, it was backed for years by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Saudi Arabia.

There was a time when Zalmay Khalilzad could argue (in a op-ed piece in the Washington Post in 1996), that the Taliban were not anti-American and could be negotiating partners. He himself as a UNOCAL executive was happy to host Taliban officials on his Texas ranch to negotiate about the TAPI natural gas pipeline. Colin Powell was able to negotiate a highly successful opium eradication program with the Taliban in early 2001. The organization’s embrace of an anti-U.S. jihad along al-Qaeda lines is largely a function of the U.S. conflation of the two organizations (the Bushite “you’re either for us or against us” doctrine — in practice a “you’re either for us or against us, especially if you’re Muslim” doctrine). It’s a result of the U.S. attack.

Al-Qaeda is primarily an Arab international jihadi movement with an anti-American ideology born out of the stationing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil in the months prior to the first Gulf War. It has a vision of a revived Caliphate. It’s actually quite different from the Taliban and there was mounting tension between the two from at least 1999 when al-Qaeda’s international terrorist actions began to cost its hosts. This al-Qaeda has in any case largely been driven from Afghanistan, with the exception of some Uzbeks of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan who are based in the north.

The current confrontation in Afghanistan is not about al-Qaeda, or the issues that prompted some renegade Saudis to attack the Twin Towers and Pentagon eight years ago. It’s about Afghan dislike of outside interference, Pashtun nationalism, outrage at U.S. bombing (that has even caused MPs to shut down Parliament in protest on occasion), disillusionment with corruption in the Karzai-warlord regime, a certain comfort level some had with the previous socio-political order. Surely Islam has something to do with it in that the Qur’an calls upon the believer to fight injustices inflicted upon fellow Muslims. But for Obama to say the war in Afghanistan at this point is “necessary” because of 9-11 is disingenuous.

If it’s “necessary,” it may be so because Afghanistan runs between the gas fields of Turkmenistan and the Indian Ocean ports which could carry it to world markets avoiding Iran and Russia. A pipeline deal was signed in 2002 but its provisions can’t be carried out until the country’s stabilized. As a declining superpower competing, among others, with a resurgent Russia flush with oil and gas money, the U.S. experiences geopolitical, capitalist-imperialist necessities. Its energy corporations need to compete for access to that gas oil, and the profits that can be obtained from them, while the Pentagon strategizes about how to control global access to energy in the event of war.

But these necessities have nothing to do with 3000 dead eight years ago. And yes, we can debate the Afghan War, however much Mr. Obama may want to close off discussion with reference to those innocent victims and that painful day.

Holbrooke to Refugees: “Glad the army came in, even though you were driven out of your homes?”

The very same day Obama was speaking, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke was in Pakistan, offering high-level symbolic support for the Pakistani Army’s campaign against what has become a full blown insurgency conducted by the Pakistani Taliban. (This is a Taliban that did not exist before U.S. invaded Afghanistan.) That counter-insurgency effort had involved the strafing of a city of 375,000 and produced 2 million refugees from the Swat Valley which had been taken over by militants. Fighting reportedly continues and the refuges have yet to return.

According to the Washington Post: “In a message he repeated several times, Holbrooke told the Pakistanis here that President Obama and the people of the United States cared about them and were helping their government to aid them. Even as he spoke, he said, Obama was reaching out to Pakistanis and other Muslims around the world in a major address in Cairo.” Holbrooke asked some of the refuges if they were “glad the army came in, even though you were driven out of your homes?” Perhaps he was trying to reassure himself that this was indeed the case.

“We will be happy when there is peace,” one refugee told him. “We want this thing to end so we can go back to our own land,” an elder shouted to him. “We are fed up with living like this.” “America has given a lot of assistance and food,” Holbrooke replied. “But it’s up to the Pakistan army to give you security. That’s not our job.”

Having thus detached the U.S. from responsibility for the crisis, Holbrooke made an ominous response to an AFP reporter’s question in a separate interview. “I don’t want to be alarmist here,” he said, “but I’m predicting some massive influx. There are concerns that there may be some spillover as there was in the past.”

He was referring to an influx of refugees from Afghanistan — the result of the “surge” of 21,000 additional U.S. forces in that country — an admission in passing of one outcome of the toppling of the Taliban due to that “war of necessity” in 2001.

It’s apparent to many Muslims and others around the world that the initial U.S. response to 9-11 has produced many negative ripple effects, including the destabilization of Pakistan, the world’s second most populous Muslim nation. That is to say, what for many Americans is the “good war” foil to the bad blundering war in Iraq is for much of the world part of the same bloody thing: at minimum, a heavy-handed reaction to an attack by rogue Saudis that indiscriminately targeted unrelated Muslim (Afghan and Iraqi) civilians — and for that matter Taliban militants who, whatever the backwardness of their ideology and brutality of their policies, had little to do with the foreigners operating secretly in their midst and planning international terrorist actions.

The U.S. set up a new regime in Afghanistan following the Loya Jirga orchestrated by George Bush and his special envoy Khalilzad, the Afghan-American neocon. It delivered power from the Talibs to the Northern Alliance warlords in the Tajik-Uzbek north and failed to deliver much of a state apparatus at all in Pashtun areas. These areas were inexorably reclaimed by the former rulers, despite the U.S.’s attempt to build an army of 132,000 which (as one U.S. officer wryly put it) a country as poor as Afghanistan “will never be able to afford.”

The administration has taken to referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan together as “Af-Pak,” recognizing that that they constitute a single problem for itself (if not acknowledging that that particular problem was generated by U.S. action). Holbrooke sort of let it slip to AFP that there’d been “spillover” from the 2001 invasion. Now there’s something much more dire happening.

Retired CIA analyst Bruce O. Riedel, who chaired a special interagency committee to develop President Obama’s policies on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the Council on Foreign Relations last month:

“In Pakistan, we face a growing coalescence of jihadist militant groups, not just in the tribal areas, but in the Punjab and in the major cities including Karachi. This is threatening the very survival of the Pakistani state as we have known it. It is not inevitable and it is not imminent, but there is a real possibility of a jihadist state emerging in Pakistan sometime in the future. And that has to be one of the worst nightmares American foreign policy could have to deal with.”

Note the truly grim tone. The survival of the Pakistani state “as we have known it” (as opposed to a Taliban State # 2 Plus Nukes) is a stake. Maybe the subtext is that the Bush administration by taking its “eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and going into the “war of choice” in Iraq miscalculated the Afghan-based Taliban, which is now (given its fundamentally pan-Pashtun character, which the neocons probably didn’t think about) capable of wreaking havoc in Pakistan. (The Taliban is rooted among the Pashtuns who make up 42% of the Afghan population — 14 million — and who also make up 15% of Pakistan’s population — 26 million. They are separated by the Durand Line, the border between the two countries, a line drawn by a British colonial officer’s pen in the 1890s which means nothing to the Pashtun tribes.)

Clinton: “The Existential Threat to the State of Pakistan”

On April 23 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Congress, “I think we cannot underscore [enough] the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing advances [of the Taliban],” adding that Pakistan also potentially poses a “mortal threat” to the U.S. and other countries. More recently General David Petraeus, Commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Pakistanis via Fox News that their “very existence” was threatened by Taliban militants and that “clearly, there is going to be a tough fight,” while Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a meeting of defense ministers in Singapore that the Taliban’s emergence in Pakistan is an “existential threat” to the country.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair John Kerry was in Pakistan early in the month contributing to the sense of crisis, telling reporters, “The government has to ratchet up the urgency” in the counterinsurgency. It seems Kerry doesn’t think “that the effort has been resourced the way that it needs to be either in the personnel or the strategy.” (Former Lt. Kerry having won medals fighting Vietnamese freedom fighters apparently considers himself qualified to counsel the Pakistanis about countering insurgents.)

In April 1971 this Kerry as an antiwar activist famously asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich, perhaps the country’s preeminent military historian, has recently noted that Kerry also testified to Congress at that time that he and other soldiers were “probably angriest” about all the lies they’d been told about Vietnam and “the mystical war against communism.”

Bacevich likens “the mystical war on terrorism” with the “mystical war against communism” and says it “prevents us from seeing things as they are.” He says the “jihadist threat” in both Afghanistan and Pakistan “falls well short of being existential.” He also realizes that the war in Afghanistan is precisely what’s generating the Pakistani Taliban. But the consensus in Washington seems to be that the survival of Pakistan is at stake and that the U.S. has to somehow respond by altering its strategy in the region—in the direction of escalation justified my explanations that prevent us from seeing things as they really are. Surely what Barbara Tuchman called the “March of Folly.”

Interestingly enough, on that very same day Hillary Clinton made her “existential” remark the new Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman stated that Israel’s biggest “existential threat” was not Iran (which it had been touting for many months as such) but in fact Pakistan. The Israel Lobby had been using that term “existential” a lot in reference to Iran’s supposed threat to itself — proposing that its nuclear power program constituted a threat to global Jewry unprecedented since Nazism — dangerously ratcheting up the tension between Tehran and Washington. Now Lieberman was holding up the specter of a Talibanized Pakistan (which unlike Iran, actually has nukes) as an even greater threat, while Clinton was impressing on Congress that Pakistan was in deep trouble and U.S. resources were urgently needed in “Af-Pak.”

Since April, the Pakistani Army has indeed taken action against the Pakistani Taliban — to loud expressions of U.S. approval. When Petraeus made his comment about the Taliban threatening Pakistan’s existence he followed up by praising the Pakistan Army for taking “the kind of action, with the size of forces they have in the western part of the country, [which] demonstrates that they understand that there is a more immediate threat to the country” than some other unspecified one.

It may seem odd that the U.S. military is expressing appreciation that the Pakistani military is showing an understanding of the security threat that the Taliban poses to itself on its own home turf. But twice before, in 2005 and 2008, Pakistan’s army has attacked the insurgents only to meet with defeat, cut deals and withdraw over U.S. murmurs of disapproval that this was not helping the effort in Afghanistan. This time the Pentagon hopes the Pakistani military is serious and will not just “pacify” Swat but move on to an engagement with the forces of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan. The Swat operation was a dress rehearsal for this much larger, riskier campaign.

The U.S.-Pakistani Relationship

The U.S. does not exactly enjoy a neocolonial-type relationship with the Pakistani military, which dominates state affairs. Riedel refers to the latter’s enduring resentment of the Pressler Amendment sanctions imposed by the first President Bush, which from 1990 singled out Pakistan for punishment for its nuclear weapons program (itself a response to India’s explosion of a nuclear device in 1974). After a decade of close cooperation with the Pakistani military in the 1980s (in “bleeding the Soviet Union in Afghanistan”), following the end of the Cold War Washington decided it didn’t need Pakistan so much and cut off various forms of aid. (Meanwhile the Najibullah regime finally fell to the Northern Alliance jihadis in 1993, throwing Afghanistan into new bloody paroxysms for which the Pakistanis had to pay while the Gulbuddin’s Hekmatyar’s paymasters quietly left the stage.)

Strong military and political ties resumed after 9-11 but only after Islamabad was bludgeoned into obedience. The real “existential threat” to Pakistan loomed right after the attacks, when the U.S. State Department conveyed to President Musharraf the message that Pakistan should “prepare to be bombed, be prepared to go back to the Stone Age” if it didn’t cooperate in this war against the Taliban. Musharraf later, in an interview with BBC, called this a “very rude remark.” (By the way, what Iranian leader has ever made such a threat to any country?) The fact that Musharraf could publicly complain about such nuclear diplomacy may show a measure of independence. But of course at the time he capitulated to U.S. demands, much as they were to cost his country.

The Pentagon has recently reported to Congress that U.S. aid to Pakistan for fighting terrorism has been misused for purchasing combat aircraft among other things for conventional conflict with India. There appear to be deep issues of trust here on both sides. Pakistan is after all a Muslim state, born out of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s dream of a state formed from the Muslim-majority parts of the British Raj in distinction from what became overwhelmingly Hindu India. It was a vision of a secular state, but Islam is likely to be a strong part of any Pakistani military officer’s personal identity. Surely this is apparent U.S. officers (likely to be sincere Christians) having any personal contact with Pakistani counterparts as they collaborate and cooperate on border missions. It may leave some of them secretly wondering whether the Pakistanis can really handle the problem of anti-American Taliban militant activity in their country.

When you look at the biblical packaging of the daily intelligence briefings that circulated high up in the Defense Department in the early months of the Iraq war, or consider that a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Bush spoke in uniform at churches saying the Christian God is “bigger” than the Muslim one (since “his was an idol”), you can imagine that the Pentagon brass might suspect the Pakistanis, and that the Pakistanis might legitimately suspect that the U.S. is involved in a global effort against their religion. You can imagine, that is, a certain mutual wariness in the relationship between the militaries in whatever capacity they cooperate.

Then there is this matter Petraeus alludes to indirectly: “a more immediate threat to the country.” By this he obviously meant India, which the U.S. is cultivating as a regional superpower and ally vis-à-vis China and Russia. This is the India which, like Israel and Pakistan, never signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty but acquired nuclear weapons and was subject to U.S. sanctions as a result (although never as damaging to it as those applied to Pakistan).

The Commander of U.S. Central Command obviously thinks that the Taliban is a more immediate threat to Pakistan than India. He is a representative of a country whose Congress just passed the “123 Agreement” opening India’s vast nuclear industry to investment by U.S. firms. The Indian Parliament is expected to soon pass a Logistics Support Agreement that will allow refueling, maintenance and servicing of U.S. military ships and planes at Indian ports and bases and vice versa. Obviously the official U.S. position is that India is no threat to Pakistan at all.

In this context, as Pakistan copes with the consequences of the Swat crackdown, as the Pentagon urges the Pakistanis to move against Mehsud in South Waziristan — producing many more refugees; and and as State Department and Pentagon officials admit that they have no real plan about how to proceed in Afghanistan as the Taliban consolidate its position there, Obama through Holbrooke assures the Pakistani people and army of his “concern.”

Holbrooke: “I don’t want to be alarmist here, but I’m predicting some massive influx. There are concerns that there may be some spillover as there was in the past.”

In late 2001 the CIA station chief in Islamabad had concluded that the Taliban was a “spent force” even as the Guardian reported its leadership relocating to luxurious villas in Pakistan. Nowadays that “spent force” has regained control of much of the south and east of Afghanistan. Most of the real fighting is along the border with Pakistan. President Hamid Karzai realizes that the insurgency is not going to go away and has repeatedly offered to negotiate with the Taliban, including Mullah Omar. The Taliban-aligned forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami are meanwhile advancing on Kabul, and as AP notes matter-of-factly, summer is “traditional fighting season in Afghanistan” when U.S. combat deaths already at record levels are likely to increase.

One recalls Marx’s observation that world-historical events occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The initial “spillover” to which Holbrooke alluded cost the lives of over 1,100 Pakistani troops and 8000 insurgents, as well as (according to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies) 1,765 civilian deaths between October 2008 and March 2009 alone, and culminated in a refugee crisis involving two million people. These were the tragic and probably unintentional consequences of U.S. action in Afghanistan.

But here you have Obama’s special envoy to “Af-Pak” predicting even more refugees, as the consequence of the “surge” of 21,000 more troops next door, while Pakistan copes with the blowback of the U.S. actions to date. Another huge refugee exodus is predicted from South Waziristan as the Army moves in at U.S. urging. U.S. forces are proceeding ahead consciously towards a show-down with the Taliban aware that this may well destroy Pakistan “as we know it.”

“But let us be clear,” says Obama, “al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day.”

So that’s why we’re still in Afghanistan, you see, with more troops on the way, as waves of people stream across Pakistan. What a farce.

Ross and Holbrooke: “Everybody Needs to Worry About Iran”

Now, while over 50,000 U.S. troops alongside the Afghan army-in-training will be confronting local guerrillas (and attacking some across the border in Pakistan too) in order to prevent another 9-11, just imagine what all might be happening in the surrounding world.

Pakistan is not just bordered by Afghanistan but by India, China and Iran. It has generally had good relations with Iran, despite the fact that Iran’s Shiite theocracy opposed Pakistan’s policy of cultivating the fiercely anti-Shiite Taliban in Afghanistan. If the U.S. attacks Iran in the coming year (or if Israel does so) it will surely confirm in the minds of Muslims throughout the world — Pakistanis among those most directly affected — that the U.S. is engaged in a Crusade against them. All of them: Sunni and Shiite, from the more or less secular (Saddam’s Iraq) to the deeply traditional (the Taliban’s Afghanistan).

Holbrooke is, along with Dennis Ross, Hillary Clinton’s top advisor on Iran, the author of a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that ran just nine months ago. Entitled “Everybody Needs to Worry About Iran” it strives to “mobilize the power of a united American public in opposition” to what it terms the Iranian regime’s drive to become “a nuclear state.” (Ross has been Special Advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Hillary Clinton but has left that post for a more powerful White House job.)

Linger on that statement alone for a moment. Here are Holbrooke and Ross writing ten months after the NIE in which the U.S. intelligence community declared with “high confidence” that Iran had no nuclear program that they want to mobilize public opinion to believe the exact opposite. This should make every aware person with an awareness of U.S. history (and the mobilization of public opinion around lies targeting Muslims) sick to their stomach.

Ross is known to favor a policy of “diplomatic engagement” with Iran whereby the Iranians are asked to to stop doing something every NPT signatory nation is legally entitled to do (enrich uranium) and when they decline to do so, attack them or give the green light to Israel to do so on the “existential threat”/”nuclear Holocaust” preemptive war causus belli pretext.

Perhaps Holbrooke does feel some alarm when he imagines how people in Afghanistan and Pakistan might respond to an infidel attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran — maybe in the context of massive refugee spillovers and civil wars all supposedly “necessitated” by the U.S. response to 9-11. Afghanistan is 19%, Pakistan 20% Shiite, and while Shiite belief does not necessitate sympathy with Shiite Iran under imperialist or Zionist attack it is a likely predictor of it.

I don’t want to be an alarmist here, but I will observe that Bush’s vaguely conceived “war on terror” is spilling over into Pakistan, big time. It could hardly be otherwise given the artificiality of the border, and its permeability, a legacy of Islamabad’s (necessarily) gentle hand in dealing with the tribes in the North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. By demanding Islamabad take action against militants on the border Washington has actually forced its Pakistani allies to repeatedly provoke the tribesmen, thus destabilizing a country of 173 million, armed with nukes and with a history of three wars with neighboring India and ongoing conflict over Kashmir.

They say in Pakistan “All Taliban are Pashtuns, but not all Pashtuns are Taliban” and it does seem that support for the Taliban is very limited. But the prospect that Riedel raises — of a “jihadist state” — is disturbing, and the potential for such perhaps exists as an Army deployed to suppress the jihadis repeatedly cuts deals with them, trading peace for the implementation of the sharia. But how could they have done otherwise, given the balance of forces in a country that Washington began to knock off balance in 2001?

As Pakistani opposition figure Imran Khan told the Middle East Institute recently, about 25 percent of the troops involved in recent campaign against the Taliban in the Swat Valley are Pashtuns. “Pakistan is at risk,” he declared. “How long will the government soldiers keep fighting their own people? If ever the Taliban were discredited and the public was behind the military operation, it was during the Swat operation. But the anger against the army is much greater. When the true horrors of the collateral damage are known . . . the Taliban will have won” through new recruits.

Holbrooke was in Pakistan to testify that that Pakistani Army, driving people out of their homes in the Swat Valley, is on the same side as Barack Obama. But he’s no doubt concerned about the prospect that the crackdown on the Pakistani Taliban will produce blowback for the U.S. He’s nervous about the prospects for the anti-Taliban effort retaining “hearts and minds” long-term as homelessness and war continue.

That’s the big picture: U.S. preparations for a dramatic acceleration of the Terror War in “Af-Pak,” still justified by tired references to that tragedy eight years ago, while the U.S. continues to threaten Iran and to make everything much worse still.

This isn’t Bush’s war anymore. It’s Obama’s slightly prettified War on Terror, Part II, Af-Pak Theater. And it’s not about 9-11. It has never been, really; that’s just been the rhetoric addressed to the U.S. masses designed to exploit to the max the recollected pain of that one day, and to the world to justify aggression in the name of national security.

It’s really about empire — endless “surges” on behalf of empire justified by urgent appeals for action against existential threats. It’s a farce with ongoing tragic consequences for people in the region, and pain the American people themselves have only begun to feel. So far the combined U.S. death toll for the Iraq and Afghan aggressions is just a little over 5,000. But lately the casualties in Afghanistan are nearly matching those in Iraq.

Those who’ve hoped or thought Obama would be an anti-war president: please watch his deputies Holbrooke and Ross carefully. They’re not so dissimilar from the neocons they’ve replaced and their visions of regime change may spell more ruin for the world.

And of course, “collateral damage”: As was reported in The News in Pakistan May 19:

Several persons, including women and children, were killed and a number of others sustained injuries when families fleeing the military operation in Swat’s Matta town were shelled while crossing a mountainous path to reach Karo Darra in Dir Upper on Monday, eyewitnesses and official sources said. Eyewitnesses, who escaped the attack or were able to reach Wari town of Dir Upper in injured condition, said they were targeted by gunship helicopters. However, police officials said they might have been hit by a stray shell. Local people said they saw some 12 to 14 bodies on a mountain on the Swat side but could not go near to retrieve them or help the injured for fear of another aerial attack.

What a nightmare scenario for Pakistan.

We’re talking about the Pakistani Army sometimes fighting over the last year to retake towns from Taliban forces in the Buner region of the North-West Frontier Province that are closer to the capital of Islamabad than the Afghan border. And while the Talibs apparently lack popular support, even among the Pashtuns (who are 15 % of the Pakistani population—26 million and 42% of the Afghan population—14 million) they have been able to inflict embarrassing defeats on the army.

Tehreek-i-Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud, head of the militant forces in South Waziristan, established his credentials when his forces captured 300 Pakistani soldiers and traded them for about 30 imprisoned militants in the fall of 2007. Time and again, the several (sometimes rival) “Taliban” forces, which did not exist before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan created them, have forced the government to negotiate terms. Most recently in February, Islamabad agreed to the implementation of the Sharia in the Swat Valley in exchange for peace. The Taliban broke the agreement in April, or so the story goes, and the army claims it’s killed 1,100 militants since.

But curiously, as of Sunday it claimed to have killed only 10 Taliban, while boasting of seizing (according to AP) “a spot nicknamed ‘bloody intersection’ because militants routinely dumped the mutilated bodies of their victims there.” On Monday, I read of another four dead militants but the Taliban announced through a spokesman that they would maintain “aides” in place in the city, cease fire, and advise civilians to return. It appears most have retreated to other towns, including Buner and Daggar where fighting goes on now. This they can do under cover of the masses of refugees of course.

Now think of what has happened here. Whether or not this was Osama bin Laden’s conscious plan, the local, ethnically-based, ideological movement most receptive to his own (i.e., the Taliban, or more precisely, multiple talibans on the Pakistan side of the border) has flourished since the U.S. attack upon Afghanistan in response to the 9-11 attacks. The imperialist response to 9-11 inflamed Pashtunistan. The toppling of the Taliban itself aroused indignation among many Pakistani as well as Afghan Pashtuns. Some militants fleeing east met with the traditional Pasthtunwali welcome, as they would under less stressful circumstances, and beyond that political sympathy.

The drone missile attacks, the civilian deaths, the contemptuous official denials, the repeated insults to national sovereignty, the connivance of the regime in power, have angered many, perhaps most, Pakistanis. While the Taliban has undergone a quiet resurgence in southern Afghanistan, leading U.S. generals to conclude that a military solution to the war is impossible, bands of religious “students” gathering around tribal leaders and warlords in Pakistan forming the umbrella “Movement of the Taliban” or Tehreek-e-Taliban under Mahsud have been able to generate this kind of chaos.

The Army had been deployed before against Indian forces. But the disproportionately Pashtun force had never confronted or been trained to confront fanatical Pashtun jihadis–particularly when the issue was the implementation of the Sharia. Not surprisingly it performed badly and Islamabad wound up cutting a deal in February to implement Islamic law in the Swat Valley. U.S. Defense Secretary Gates can criticize that judgment in stating, “We want to support [the Pakistanis]. We want to help them in any way we can. But it is important that they recognize the real threats to their country.” And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can tell Congress, “I think the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists [by making a peace deal in Swat]. Changing paradigms and mindsets is not easy, but I do believe there is an increasing awareness of not just the Pakistani government but the Pakistani people that this insurgency coming closer and closer to major cities does pose such a threat.”

It’s easy to lecture about such things, to judge the actions of another government facing a crisis. But isn’t it obvious that (what Clinton has, since at least April, been calling) Pakistan’s “existential threat” wouldn’t be closing in on the cities of that country had the U.S. not responded to 9-11 with the knee-jerk bombing of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban? President Pervez Musharraf recalled that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told him soon after 9-11 to “prepare to go back to the Stone Age” if he didn’t cooperate with the U.S. in the war on terrorism. The existential threat to Pakistan was the Bush administration!

The Bush administration pressured Musharraf to deploy the Pakistan Army in border provinces where it had never been deployed and where its very presence was perceived as a provocation. The result was the September 2005 “peace agreement” in which the government agreed to halt military operations along the border and dismantle checkpoints in return for tribal leaders’ commitment to end support for militancy and prevent cross-border incursions into Afghanistan. It was a face-saving defeat for the regime that drew U.S. criticism, as have all subsequent deals with the militants, which have in any case broken down, like the February deal in Swat.

The 2005 agreement followed the notorious Lal Masjid episode in Islamabad when the security forces stormed an important seminary and hotbed of Islamist activism. The khatib (prayer-leader) had been dismissed for issuing a fatwa stating no Pakistani Army officer could be given an Islamic burial if died fighting the Taliban, and then the mosque had risen up in general rebellion, sparking solidarity attacks on government forces by militants in North Waziristan and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The government was forced to back down.

That’s been the pattern ever sense. Get tough on the “insurgents,” with U.S. prodding, funding, and threats of funding reduction and direct intervention. Then negotiate with tribal and religious leaders, recognizing locals’ mistrust of outsiders, the Pakistani state, and its international backers, which the mullahs may identify as U.S. imperialism and Zionism. And watch both carrot and stick policies fail as Pakistan’s own homegrown Taliban insurgency swells alongside the recrudescent original next door.

Now, while the Pakistani Army is still struggling to take control of Mingora and the Taliban is regrouping, the insurgents have pulled off a brazen attack on the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) office compound in Lahore, in eastern Pakistan, on the border with India, killing about 30 and injuring 250. The irony here of course is that the Taliban was nurtured by the ISI in the 1990s and the attackers may well have known the location of ISI offices for that very reason.

Such terror has Bush’s war on terror visited on Pakistan, with no end in sight. And Obama’s war in “Af-Pak,” reliant on a troop surge, more Predator drone attacks, and maybe some “divide and conquer” tactics, hold out little promise for relief. U.S. officials screw up their faces as if genuinely puzzled about while the Pakistanis aren’t doing more–as if puzzled about why they don’t understand that their existence is at stake. The fact is that they are the ones on the outside looking in, who do not understand that the interests of U.S. imperialism do not cause religious and national and ethnic sensibilities to disappear or make it possible for local leaders, even those on the imperialist payroll, to snap their fingers, crush local resistance and produce social peace. The interests of U.S. imperialism in this case, in the form of regime change in Afghanistan, and the way it was done, have antagonized much of the Pakistani population.

This is Washington’s unwanted gift to Islamabad, for which Islamabad keeps getting paid and keeps paying.

By appointing Mitchell, Obama may be signaling Israel that he’s going to get tough on the settlements issue.

As a former senator from Maine, Mitchell was chosen by President Clinton in 2001 to head an international committee to investigate the causes of the Second Intifada. It did not mention Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Dome of the Rock in September 2000 following the breakdown of talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders at Camp David; the status of East Jerusalem (occupied by Israelis in 1967) had been discussed at the talks and Sharon wanted to make a point about Israel’s eternal sovereignty over an extremely holy Muslim site. The report did however note:

“For the Palestinian side, “Madrid” and “Oslo” heralded the prospect of a State, and guaranteed an end to the occupation and a resolution of outstanding matters within an agreed time. Palestinians are genuinely angry at the continued growth of settlements and at their daily experiences of humiliation and disruption as a result of Israel’s presence in the Palestinian territories. Palestinians see settlers and settlements in their midst not only as violating the spirit of the Oslo process, but also as application of force in the form of Israel’s overwhelming military superiority.”

It stated: “A cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence will be particularly hard to sustain unless the GOI freezes all settlement construction activity. Settlement activities must not be allowed to undermine the restoration of calm and the resumption of negotiations.”

That recommendation might seem to be a matter of common sense, since Israel illegally occupies territories it captured in the “preemptive” 1967 war. The United Nations General Assembly, whose Resolution 181 recommending the partition of Palestine in 1947 helped give rise to and legitimate the Jewish state, has repeatedly demanded that Israel withdraw from the West Bank, Gaza and Syria’s Golan Heights. But Israel, protected by the U.S., ignores these resolutions.

The West Bank settler population grew from about 200,000, at the time of the Mitchell report to about 280,000 today while the Bush administration muted its criticism. Jewish population growth on the West Bank is increasing by about 5% per year as opposed to less than 2% in Israel.

Mitchell’s appointment may mean a new U.S. attitude. Mitchell’s mother was a Lebanese immigrant, while his father was an Irish-American orphan raised by a Lebanese immigrant family. NPR reports that as a boy Mitchell served as an altar boy in an Arabic-speaking Maronite Catholic church.(It’s hard to say what all that might mean; Lebanon’s Maronites have been prone towards anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian flirtations with Israel to say nothing of the fascist ideology of the Phalange party.) Anyway, Mitchell (unlike Ross) is not a neocon, and he’s acquired a reputation for even-handedness, in his diplomatic work involving Northern Ireland in the 1990s.

So some Lobby leaders became immediately anxious. The ADL’s Abraham Foxman observed: “Sen. Mitchell is fair. He’s been meticulously even-handed. But the fact is, American policy in the Middle East hasn’t been ‘even handed’ — it has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support. So I’m concerned. I’m not sure the situation requires that kind of approach in the Middle East.” Mitchell’s appointment just might indicate the administration’s desire to finally place U.S. clout behind the creation of some kind of Palestinian state. Maybe the Obama team sees making some progress on the “roadmap” the prerequisite for obtaining other goals in Southwest Asia (more vital to the Empire than those of the Israel Lobby).

By appointing Dennis Ross, Obama is sending the Iranian leaders a clear message. He is associating himself with the most extreme alarmist positions currently articulated, including those of Norman Podhoretz. Ross wants to bomb Iran, and soon, unless the Iranians cease their uranium enrichment program. See the op-ed piece co-authored by Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke, R. James Woolsey, and Mark D. Wallace in the Wall Street Journal Sept. 22, 2008. It’s entitled, “Everybody Needs to Worry About Iran” and its authors state: “Iran is now edging closer to being armed with nuclear weapons, and it continues to develop a ballistic-missile capability.”

This contradicts the conclusion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies (Central Intelligence Agency, Army Military Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, etc.) as of November 2007. Those authors reported: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” In other words, in the world of empirical methods, critical thinking and analysis–the world of hundreds of trained professionals who’ve actually researched Iran’s nuclear program, with access to spy satellite data, reports from agents in the field, electronic surveillance–Iran has no nuclear program. Mohamed ElBaradei and IAEA staffers on the ground have consistently said that Iran has been thoroughly cooperative and that there are no signs of any diversion for a military program But in the world of this Chicken Little group Iran is edging ever nearer to nukes.

The editorial describes the nuclear program as “destabilizing” (while noting that Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel all have nuclear weapons) and repeats the old Cheneyism that since Iran has so much oil it can’t have any possible real need for a civilian program. (The Iranian nuclear program was encouraged by the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations when the Shah was in power and supported by General Electric and other U.S. firms.) It repeats the old charge that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe Israel off the map (adding that he’s said it could be done with one nuke) and generally assembles all the Bush-era anti-Iran talking-points: Iran sponsors Hizbollah and Hama terrorism, the regime’s repressive towards women and homosexuals, Iran could shut off the Strait of Hormuz, etc.

In conclusion the authors announce their establishment “along with other policy advocates from across the political spectrum” of the nonpartisan group United Against Nuclear Iran. The message, at the height of the presidential campaign, was: this isn’t a McCain vs. Obama, or more importantly a Bush era vs. Obama era thing. We should all of us–the former CIA director Woolsey (big-time purveyor of disinformation leading up to the Iraq invasion), alongside the two future Obama officials and the Bush-Cheney 2004 deputy campaign manager–unite in our worry about what the NIE says with “high confidence” doesn’t exist, just like Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction didn’t exist!

In April 2008, according to the Canadian Jewish News, Ross told Toronto’s Shaarei Shomayim Congregation that Iran will have “crossed the threshold of stockpiling fissionable material” within a year (reminder: it’s late January 2009 now). He sounds perilously like Norman Podhoretz, appealing to Bush to “bomb Iran!” in his June 2007 Commentary editorial.

Ross is known to favor the recommendations of a September 2008 report by something called the Bipartisan Policy Center. These include forcing Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and meet other demands by imposing blockades on Iranian gas imports and oil exports (acts of war) as well as striking “not only Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but also its conventional military infrastructure in order to suppress an Iranian response.”

So it looks like the official Obama line towards Iran, at least for the beginning, will be the Cheney-neocon line. And that is worrisome.

What does Obama have in mind for Afghanistan? Puppet president (or ought one say, “once-puppet president?”) Hamid Karzai had become increasingly critical of the U.S. over the last year, lashing out at the air strikes that have killed so many civilians, and even demanding (last November) a deadline for a pull-out of foreign forces. He’s clashed with Washington on the issue of inviting Mullah Omar to Kabul or another venue under safe conduct take part in talks, and proposed bringing the Taliban into the government. The Bush State Department had come to increasingly ignore him.

Last Wednesday during a United Nations Security Council debate on the “Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflicts” Afghan ambassador Zahir Tanin raised the issue of the killing of civilians, proposing that the U.S.-led forces avoid air strikes, cease conducting operations without consulting the Afghan government, and stop its heavy-handed and culturally insensitive tactics. That the statement was made in this public forum, rather than to the U.S. or NATO through private channels, suggests a high degree of friction between Karzai and Washington.

When Joe Biden visited Afghanistan a week and a half before the inauguration, he spent a few hours with Karzai, reportedly talking about Afghanistan’s efforts to rebuild, strengthening the Afghan army, the problem of drug trafficking, and the “war on terror.” The talks, according to Biden’s spokesperson, were “fruitful and productive.” But quite likely Karzai was questioning the wisdom of Obama’s planned “surge” in Afghanistan. (After all, British officers involved in the NATO effort are dispassionately concluding, “We’re not going to win this war.”) Perhaps signaling the new administration’s displeasure with Karzai, Hillary Clinton during her confirmation hearing referred to Afghanistan in passing as a “narco-state” reviving memories of the charges that surfaced last October of Karzai’s own brother’s involvement in opium trafficking. The Afghan foreign minister protested the characterization.

The London Independent reported last week: “Obama ready to cut Karzai adrift.” It seems the new administration is considering alternative candidates, including the articulate English-speaking Abdullah Abdullah, to back in the upcoming presidential election. Afghan-American and well-certified neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, deeply interested in pipeline construction, is also said to be interested in the post of president. Meanwhile Karzai cultivates warm ties with India, blaming India’s arch-rival Pakistan for doing to little to prevent attacks from the border area.

What will Holbrooke’s appointment as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan mean? Holbrooke has been in the State Department most of his life, from the time he graduated Brown, learned Vietnamese and worked for Agency for International Development in the Rural Pacification Program. Mentored in part by Dean Rusk, he has held numerous posts including assistant secretary of state for both Europe and Asia and ambassador to the UN. He’s seen as a highly experienced professional, credited with crafting the Dayton Agreement of 1995 which created Bosnia-Herzegovina. He’s also credited with helping to maintain the flow of U.S. arms to Suharto’s Indonesia during the brutal suppression of the revolt in East Timor and discouraging Congressional inquiry into Jakarta’s human rights abuses.

Holbrooke is going to argue, as Obama did throughout his campaign, that Afghanistan is the center of the “war on terror.” (It looks like they’re going to stick with that concept.) He’ll say Afghanistan was the source of the 9-11 attacks, the base of al-Qaeda which has not been completely defeated. The Taliban allies of al-Qaeda are gaining control of many villages in the south, and are in many places meting out justice according to the Sharia. New groups calling themselves Taliban are also flourishing on the Pakistani side of the border and offering hospitality to militants among their visiting Pashtun kin. So a much larger force than the 30,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan alongside as many international allied troops and ever-expanding Afghan army is urgently needed.

Actually, as I see it, at this point the numbers of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan are unknown, but quite likely small. The Arabs who constituted bin Laden’s circle seem to have scattered; most of the al-Qaeda in the region now seem members of a particular Uzbek organization. Al-Qaeda has always been a loose network and it’s by no means clear it’s headquartered in some cave in South Waziristan or village in Bajaur. It’s not clear what relationship the resurgent Taliban currently has to al-Qaeda; it wouldn’t seem to really need the latter for its own purposes, which are to expel the invaders and apply strict religious law.

The period between the overthrow of the last secular leader of Afghanistan, Najibullah, in 1992 and the Taliban’s seizure of power in 1996 was one of chaos under the warlords who had united as the Northern Alliance. Mullah Omar arose as the moral alternative to Hekmatyar, Massood, and other warlords. Aided by Pakistan’s ISI, he was able to built a successful however horrible movement. Recall how Sharbat Gula, the famous Afghan woman featured on the cover of National Geographic, told her interviewers in 2002: “life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order.” The perception of the Taliban as honest and selfless and a respect for the Sharia as a source of order may weaken resistance to Taliban rule, while resentment of corruption and injustice and failure to provide peace and order weaken support for the Karzai regime and local authority in Afghanistan. On the other hand there is much resentment of elements of the Taliban program, including their opposition to girls’ education and prohibitions on music and dance. But none of this has much to do with international terror, U.S. security or al-Qaeda. At present the U.S. war on the Taliban in Afghanistan is a counter-insurgency war on behalf of a weak government that has actually requested a deadline for U.S. and international troops’ withdrawal.

A pipeline from the Dauletabad gas field of Turkmenistan through to Herat and Qandahar then Multan in Pakistan and on to the Indian Ocean remains a strategic goal for Washington. Caspian Sea oil and gas are the near-equivalent in potential value to the Persian Gulf resources, but surrounded by Iran and Russia. A pipeline from Azerbaijan reaches through Georgia to end on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, but in a time of crisis Russia could easily seal it off. The international contract for pipeline construction was signed shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but work has not been feasible because the construction site is largely under Taliban control. The desire the area around Qandahar for this purpose is probably a factor in the troop increase.

Holbrooke will argue that more needs to be done to stop attacks on Afghanistan from Pakistan, and will justify the continuing U.S. policy of violating Pakistan’s sovereignty with missile attacks. Two more U.S. missiles struck targets in North and South Waziristan Friday, killing 20 people. According to AP, “Pakistan’s leaders had expressed hope Obama might halt the strikes.” Apparently not.

So, Mitchell will pressure a heedless Israel to stop the settlements just as Netanyahu is elected Prime Minister. Ross will give Iran an ultimatum it cannot accept.

Holbrooke will engineer Karzai’s ouster, work with Gen. David McKiernan to make Afghanistan the center of the “war on terror,” try to pacify the country enough to build a pipeline. Meanwhile, he’ll keep the pressure on Pakistan to go after the Taliban, even as the Taliban and their supporters and imitators proliferate, while the U.S. continues to bomb Pakistan, insulting its national pride, violating international law, outraging its legislators, provoking official protests and mass demonstrations.

It’s not looking like change or hope.

It’s not looking good.

Somewhere along the road American public opinion, which history shows can be easily persuaded of things that just aren’t true, has bought several highly questionable propositions:

1. Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

2. Iran’s nuclear program can have only one purpose, the production of nuclear weapons.

3. The Iranian leadership wishes to, and has threatened to, wipe Israel off the face of the map.

4. Given all of the above, Iran’s progress towards nuclear enrichment must be stopped in order to prevent a second, “nuclear” Holocaust.

These propositions — Big Lies that that become better established with each retelling — are in fact easily refutable.

1. The U.S. intelligence community itself doesn’t believe that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. In November 2007 all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate that declared “with high confidence” that Iran had suspended any such program as of 2003. Dick Cheney’s office tried to suppress that report and with George Bush told the chagrined Israeli government he would ignore it. (Recall that Cheney and the neocons surrounding him insisted with equal vigor in opposition to IAEA evidence to the contrary that Iraq had an active nuclear program in 2001 that could produce a “mushroom cloud over New York City”?)

We’re not talking about some liberal blogs challenging the Bush-Cheney claims here. We’re talking about the Central Intelligence Agency, Army Military Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, etc. Highly trained, professional, critically-thinking researchers whose best judgment is: Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.

Repeat (because this is so important): U.S. intelligence doesn’t believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

2. Cheney on many occasions insisted that Iran, with its vast petroleum wealth, could only have one reason to seek nuclear power. But successive U.S. administrations from the 1960s urged Iran, when it was ruled by the Shah (whom the CIA had placed in power), to develop a nuclear energy program. U.S. corporations such as General Electric were deeply invested in that program.

3. Iran has rarely attacked another country in the last thousand years, and never in modern times. On the contrary it has been the victim of aggression, most notably in the Iran-Iraq War, when Saddam Hussein, attacked in 1980. The U.S. supported Iraq; Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam twice, offered aid including satellite intelligence crucial to the Iraqi war effort. The idea that Iran aspires to initiate war with a country a thousand miles away because of ingrained anti-Semitism among the leadership is very questionable. Iran has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel, with representation in the Parliament (Majlis). Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not called for Israel to be “wiped of the map” but once quoted Ayatollah Khomeini (who died in 1989) as stating that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time.” As Professor Juan Cole explains, “Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope — that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government.” The claim that Iran has “repeatedly stated its intention to destroy the state of Israel” is pure alarmist propaganda peddled by those calling openly for the bombing of Iran!

4. Iran’s advancement towards nuclear enrichment is a progress towards something realized not only by countries with nuclear weapons (including, one must emphasize, Israel, which unlike Iran never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty) but by Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. Again: nuclear enrichment is not a crime but an inalienable right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty whereby nations agree not to produce nuclear weapons in exchange for assistance in developing peaceful nuclear programs under carefully monitored conditions. The rules allow them control over the entire “nuclear fuel cycle” under IAEA inspections.

The idea that Iran is a special exception to the rules is an obvious conceit of the Bush-Cheney era propaganda. The idea that if normal rules apply, and Iran proceeds as usual and gets its nuclear reactors online, nukes will forthwith rain down on Israel (with its 200 warheads) and produce a second Holocaust (frying Israeli Jews and Palestinian alike) is wild, paranoid fantasy.

So let Obama say, unequivocally: We recognize and respect Iran’s right to have a peaceful nuclear program monitored by the IAEA, to enrich uranium, to master the nuclear cycle—just like any other normal nation.

Should he not do so, the burden is on him to explain why, as the candidate of “change” and “hope,” who on Inauguration Day told the Muslim world he would seek “a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect” he continues the Bush-Cheney policy of vilification, insinuation, and Zionist pandering in connection with this issue.

The Bible readers among you will know that the story appears in the Book of Judges, and that Samson is the last listed in a line of “judges” who lead the Israelites after their delivery out of slavery in Egypt.

According to Judges, an angel of Yahweh appeared to Samson’s mother, up to then a barren woman, and announced that she would conceive a son. She was to drink no wine and eat nothing unclean, and consecrate her newborn to Yahweh as a “nazirate,” meaning that he was never to cut his hair, consume alcohol, or come near a dead body. As we will see, he does not keep these vows.

At the time of the story, the dominant people in the area were the people the Bible calls Philistines, an Indo-European people related to the Greeks whom archeological evidence suggests had settled in Gaza City from around 1180 BCE. Our word “Palestine” comes from them.

The boy Samson was born and, according to the Biblical account, on attaining manhood, “noticed a woman, a Philistine girl.” He thus ordered his parents: “now get her for me, to be my wife” (Judges 14: 2). They appealed to him to take an Israelite girl instead, but he was adamant. The scripture explains that “all this came from Yahweh, who was seeking grounds for a quarrel with the Philistines, since at this time the Philistines dominated Israel.” (Judges 14:4).

Young Samson turns out to be quite the superhero. Heading off to the Philistine’s vineyards he happens upon a lion roaring towards him. He rips the animal apart with his bare hands. Not telling anyone about it, he visits and woos his intended. Later he returns to the lion’s carcass to find that bees have nested within it, and he harvests honey. His father arrives at the girl’s home to negotiate a marriage, and a large feast is held. Samson poses a riddle for the young Philistine men to solve: “Out of the eater came what is eaten, out of the strong came what is sweet.” He assumes they can’t possibly know what had happened between him, the lion, and the bees. He tells them if they can answer the riddle he will give them thirty pieces of fine linen and thirty festal robes and if not they will each owe him that amount of treasure. They foolishly agree, all presumably in their cups.

The Philistines charged with solving the riddle go to Samson’s betrothed and demand that she wheedle the answer from him, threatening to burn her and her relatives to death if she doesn’t.

Defeated by her wiles, he divulges the secret to her, and so when he poses the riddle to the Philistines on his wedding night, just before he’s about to go to bed, they’re able to answer: “What is sweeter than honey, and what is stronger than a lion?”

At that point the “spirit of Yahweh” seizes Samson, which is to say, he goes berserk. He races to Ashkelon, kills thirty Philistines, steals their clothes and gives them to the Philistines who correctly answered his riddle.

After he calms down Samson returns to the house of his betrothed but finds that her father, who’d just assumed–given his earlier behavior–that he’d lost interest, has given her to the best man at the ceremony. He offers Samson instead the younger sister, but this only angers the young Israelite. He captures three hundred foxes, sets their tails on fire, and has them incinerate the cornfields of the Philistines, as well as the vines and olive orchards (Judges 15:5). This in turn enrages the Philistines who blame the girl’s family for the problem and burn them to death.

Then the Philistines, for obvious reasons, make a foray into Israelite territory demanding that Samson be turned over to them. The Israelites rationally comply, forking over the bound culprit, but Samson (as the spirit of Yahweh again possesses him) is able to break out of his bonds, and finding the jawbone of a donkey on the roadside uses it to slaughter a thousand Philistines.

He then proceeds to Gaza City, where he spends the night in a brothel. Philistines surround the establishment but hesitate to move against him. At midnight he emerges, hoists the posts of the town gate on his shoulders, and carries them with them forty miles away to Hebron (Judges 16:3).

Then comes his hubris moment: he falls for Delilah, another Philistine woman. The Philistine elders offer her a fortune to discern the secret of restraining Samson’s superhuman strength. So she pleads with him to divulge the mystery. Three times he gives her bogus answers (such as, “If I were tied with seven new bowstrings that had not been dried, I should lose my strength”), and each time she sets up the situation he describes, crying out, “The Philistines are on you Samson!” Each time he easily escapes harm.

Finally he admits that the secret of his strength is that a razor has never touched his head, and that if his head were shorn, he would be just like any other man. So she lulls him to sleep, summons a barber, and has his long locks shorn off. Samson is captured, humiliated, blinded, and set to work at a grind-wheel. Philistines did indeed place subject prisoners to such treatment in Gaza in the twelfth century BCE.

Finally, months later, as Samson’s hair has grown back, the Philistines are holding a banquet to their god Dagon and call for Samson to be brought before them so that they might mock the man who had laid their country waste. While three thousand men and women watch, Samson braces himself between the two central pillars of the building, calls upon Yahweh, shouts “Let me die with the Philistines” and brings the building down.

“He had judged Israel for twenty years,” concludes the account in Judges (16:31).

Certain premises underlie the whole Book of Judges. The god Yahweh, better known to King James Bible readers as Jehovah, has chosen the Israelites as his people. He has made a covenant with the descendants of Abraham, to eventually give them the land from the Nile of Egypt to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18). He has made them a great nation while in Egypt, although allowing them to be enslaved. He has led them out of bondage through his servant, the prophet Moses, the Lawgiver, miraculously parting the waves of the Red Sea to allow their crossing, then drowning the pharaoh’s army as it pursued the fleeing Hebrews.

(Actually, there’s precious little evidence for any Hebrew presence in ancient Egypt at all, much less wide scale enslavement. The whole heroic Exodus narrative is of very dubious historicity.

An English forklift mechanic’s discovery of a “chariot wheel” in the Red Sea in 2003 caused a ripple of excitement among those wanting badly to believe in the Exodus tale, but the story never went anywhere.)

In the Old Testament, Yahweh chastens the Hebrews for their lapses into idolatry through years of wondering through the Sinai desert but finally brings to Canaan, where he orders them to exterminate the local people. (See for example Joshua 11:14, describing the capture of the town of Hazor, where Joshua and his men help themselves to the livestock “[b]ut they put all the human beings to the sword till they had destroyed them completely; they did not leave a single sword.”)

Recall the story in the Book of Joshua, where Yahweh causes the walls to collapse, and then Joshua’s forces attack, enforcing “the curse of destruction on everyone in the city: men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21)? (There’s a children’s Sunday school song about it: Jericho’s walls came falling down, falling down, falling down, Hallelujah!)

The righteousness of God’s people is assumed in these stories, the expendability of the lives of their enemies–any competing with them for rights to the Promised Land–also assumed. Here as in the Book of Judges the genocide theme is woven so effortlessly into the cozily familiar themes of Chosen People and Promised Land that we might hardly even notice it. But that’s what it is: the slaughter, at God’s command, of entire peoples. Herem in Hebrew (“the curse of destruction”) meant the killing of all human beings and animals in the course of holy war.

We Americans of course have our own heroic myths of our pilgrims arriving in our Promised Land chosen by God to defeat the heathen natives, justifying so many atrocities by citing Old Testament texts.

Of the Samson story, Mary Joan Winn Leith writes in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, “It’s one of the most artfully composed tales in the Bible…A subtle study of deception and betrayal, by humans and by god, for good and for ill.”

On the other hand: what a horrible story! There are few redeeming qualities in this selfish, oversexed, vicious brute who abuses animals by setting their tails on fire and doesn’t even have the good sense to figure out that Delilah’s working with the enemy.

Now, this of course is a text probably written between 2600-2800 years ago. Its unknown author(s) have nothing to do with any contemporary political disputes, and we can’t expect the text to give us too much insight about the thinking of the Zionists in relation to this present blitzkrieg on Gaza.

Still, there are some passages to think about:

(1) “…all this came from Yahweh, who was seeking grounds for a quarrel with the Philistines, since at this time the Philistines dominated Israel” (New Jerusalem Bible, Judges 14:4; the New Oxford Bible renders this “seeking a pretext to act against the Philistines”).

The fact is, Israeli leaders have indeed sought grounds for war with the Palestinians, repeatedly. They have manufactured pretexts for decades. In 2006, they used a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli border patrol station that killed six and resulted in two Israeli soldiers being taken hostage as the pretext for a massive assault on Lebanon, killing over 1000.

The author states that Yahweh himself was looking for a fight. The secular humanist might interpret the passage to mean that the worshipers of Yahweh were spoiling for a fight with the Philistines, whose land they coveted.

(2) “Then the spirit of Yahweh seized on him. He went down to Ashkelon, killed thirty men there, took what they wore and gave the festal robes to those who had answered the riddle…” (Judges 14:19)

Ashkelon, the former Palestinian town taken over by Zionist settlers since 1948, has been in the news lately. We have heard a lot about the indiscriminate Palestinian bombardment of the town which is occasionally hit by homemade rockets from Gaza. Here in the Samson story we have the Israelite hero indiscriminately killing thirty men there. But he does so filled with the spirit of God!

You can be sure that this Sunday preachers from pulpits across the U.S. will endorse the Israeli invasion of Gaza as a godly act of self-defense. (They’ll be responding to Israel’s slick PR campaign of nauseating righteousness.) Will such ironies be lost upon them?

(3) “Let me die with the Philistines!” Samson cries as he causes the feasting-hall to collapse from its foundations (Judges 16:29).

Doesn’t this strike you as the mentality of the suicide bomber? We’re told Samson killed more at the banquet party that he had during his life (16:31) and that his brothers came to take his body away. (But he probably didn’t expect to be reborn into a Paradise; that notion hadn’t yet really pervaded Judaism. It was probably a product of later Jewish exposure to Iranian influence.)

Thus Samson the judge of Israel destroys himself and thousands of Philistines in Gaza. Definitely a Bible story worth rereading at this particular time.

Many Israelis like to present their nation to the world as little David, the shepherd boy who will be king, confronting Goliath of Gath, the Philistine giant, through the grace of God felling him with a stone from a slingshot.

I suggest another image: Israel as Samson. Wild, irrational, thuggish, untamed, covetous, given to religious obsessions, the incredible hulk able to carry away the city gates of Gaza but ultimately vulnerable. The really scary thing about Samson is that, filled with self-pity and self-righteousness even after committing atrocities against so many Philistines, he’s prepared to kill an additional 3000 and himself by bringing down the great hall on top of everyone’s head.

As one blogger wrote: “Appointing extremely anti-Iran Dennis Ross as ‘Special Envoy to Iran’ is like appointing a pedophile as kindergarten teacher.”

Ross is co-founder of AIPAC; neoconservative ideologue; big-time supporter of the Iraq War; foreign affairs commentator for Fox News; fellow with Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), sister organization of AIPAC described by one distinguished scholar (Columbia’s Rashid Khalidi) as “the most important Zionist propaganda tool in the United States;” a man who has stated (in defiance of the U.S. intelligence consensus) that Iran will “be a nuclear power, if not a nuclear weapon state” by April 2009 if not forcibly deterred.

The only reason to make him envoy to Iran is to have him repeat the Bush-Cheney ultimatum: cease enriching uranium (something the Non-Proliferation Treaty allows all signatory nations to do, and which Iran does under tight IAEA monitoring) or face a U.S. strike.

As the leader of the U.S. negotiating team during the Israeli-Palestinian talks in 1999-2000, Ross was described by fellow U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller (also Jewish) as “Israel’s lawyer” and criticized for not “critically examining” what following “Israel’s lead” would mean for U.S. interests. He is widely believed to have authored Obama’s fawning AIPAC speech presented last June.

In short his appointment does not mean CHANGE or HOPE for any so naïve as to suppose that an Obama presidency might bring either. It likely means more war, based on more false pretexts, to further reconfigure Southwest Asia.

On Oct. 2, 2002, Barack Obama told an antiwar crowd in Chicago that he opposed “the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Now he’s in bed with the neocons. His supporters ought to ask, “What happened”?

The idea is that those who’ve been governing in Gaza (to the extent that anyone can govern a concentration camp to which entry and exit by land air and sea is controlled by hostile forces, and to which almost all commerce is similarly controlled) are illegitimate, having seized power by force.

Bush and Rice, who’ve themselves seized so much by force in the last eight years (two countries’ worth) and sadly, will probably never be held accountable before a court of law for war crimes, have absolutely no shame. But to address this particular allegation of theirs.

The political party Hamas was elected to power in January 2006 with 44% of the vote to Fatah’s 41%, receiving 76 of 132 parliamentary seats, in the first democratic election held in the Palestinian territories. This was not what Washington wanted.

Washington had painted its “war on terror” in its Iraq phase as a war to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and end his close links with al-Qaeda. When such rationales stopped working, Rice began to depict the war, which we were told would go on for a long time and involve a lot more countries in the “Greater Middle East” as actually one to spread democracy.

In August 2003 as the world recoiled in horror at the images of the carnage in Iraq, she gave an upbeat speech to the National Association of Black Journalists in Dallas about “speaking out on the side of people who are seeking freedom.”

“We must never, ever,” she declared, “indulge in the condescending voices who allege that some people in Africa or in the Middle East are just not interested in freedom, they’re culturally just not ready for freedom or they just aren’t ready for freedom’s responsibilities. We’ve heard that argument before, and we, more than any, as a people, should be ready to reject it. The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East.” (Thus she sought, rather cynically, to depict the current stage of U.S. imperialist aggression as a kind of Civil Rights Movement, Part II.)

But then, when regimes in the Middle East grudgingly responded to U.S. pressure and allowed freer elections in the next few years, the big winners were the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine. To the extent that the people were able to use their freedom, they used it in ways that U.S. rulers indeed considered irresponsible. (One recalls Henry Kissinger’s comment as Secretary of State, following the election of Salvador Allende in 1970: “Chile shouldn’t be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.” That was before he helped organize the bloody fascist coup of 1973.)

Rule of thumb: “freedom” and “democracy” as used by top Washington officials are always window dressing or code words for something else.

After the poll results came in January 2006, Washington did not warmly congratulate the Palestinian people on their first successful election. Rather, officials plotted how to topple them, as the Nixon administration had once helped topple Allende. Immediately, Deputy National Security Advisor, neocon and extreme Zionist Elliott Abrams advocated a “hard coup” by Fatah (once vilified as “terrorist” when headed by Yassir Araft but now viewed as a U.S. ally under the leadership of the compliant Mahmoud Abbas) against Hamas.

And indeed, in June 2007 Fatah, heading the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, attempted such a coup, but was outmaneuvered by its rivals in the Sunni organization. David Wurmser, former advisor to Dick Cheney on the Middle East, himself a neocon who left the administration in July 2007, admits, “[W]hat happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”

In other words, Bush and Rice have it precisely backwards. They’re lying, right up to the end of this administration-based-on-lies. Having tried to dismiss the democratically elected Palestinian leadership for two years as “terrorist,” they want to further delegitimatize it by misrepresenting its path to power.

In doing so they of course insult the Palestinian democratic electorate, those who resisted the pre-empted coup to which Wurmser alludes, and those resisting the criminal invasion of the Gaza now underway with the blessing of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Elliott and the whole lame-duck, lying crew.

Speaking to small business owners in New Jersey June 16, 2003, Bush denounced those denying that “Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in ’91, in ’98, in 2003” as “revisionist historians.” As a C-average history major at Yale, Bush seems to have picked up that term without understanding what a “revisionist historian” really is. I’m inclined to think his main exposure to it comes from reading about criticism of revisionist accounts of the Holocaust, and so in his mind, historical revisionism is an inherently bad thing, an effort to falsify history. When he attacks his critics as “revisionist historians” he’s basically saying, “I’m right (in this case on the threat Saddam posed throughout the ’90s), you’re wrong, end of discussion.” Such a small, simple mind.

When asked by Bob Woodward, “How is history likely to judge your Iraq war?” Bush replied: “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” As an historian I don’t know where to begin to dissect that exchange, or Yale’s manifest failure. What is clear is that here’s a man who, while ignorant and uninterested in history, is totally comfortable with manufacturing a past out of whole cloth, without concern for the consequences.

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Not true, but hey, no biggie!

“Eighteen months ago, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a coup…” And in Bush’s revision of history, proceeded to provoke a peace-loving Israel to appropriately attack. The result of that attack? At this point, perhaps 500 Palestinians in no position to judge or know anything, but millions more alive with a sharp sense of the actual history–that will have very real consequences in the future.

Obama, who has enthused about refocusing the War on Terror back on Afghanistan, is likely to accede to the admiral’s request. There are at present under NATO command approximately 31,000 non-U.S. troops within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) fighting the Taliban and other “insurgents” in Afghanistan. (80% of these are from from the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Australia, and Turkey.) Popular opinion in most of those countries runs high against continued deployment; in Australia it is of course sold as an obligation of NATO membership.

Add to these the redoubled U.S. force and we’ll have a have a robust occupation army of 93,000 foreigners. With the exception of Albania and Azerbaijan, which have sent only small contingents, all participating nations are historically Christian, encouraging the Afghan perception that their Muslim nation is under infidel attack. In the 1980s, the Mujahadeen encouraged by the Reagan administration viewed the Soviet-backed secular regime as an assault on their religion and way of life; Soviet troops peaking at over 100,000 in 1987, with the advantage of supply lines from the immediately neighboring USSR, and including numerous ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks who could speak local languages and had some understanding of local culture, could not repress the rag-tag CIA-supplied guerrillas and secure control of the country.

Nor, as Michael Beardon warned in his prescient article in Foreign Affairs in November 2001, entitled “Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires,” could an honor roll of would-be conquerers from Alexander the Great in the third century BCE to the British in the nineteenth century defeat the hardy, fiercely independent Afghan tribesmen.

Beardon citing Louis Dupree, the premier historian of Afghanistan, attributed the “British disaster” of 1878-81 to four “mistakes”: the occupation of Afghan territory by foreign troops, the placing of an unpopular ruler in power, harsh acts committed against local enemies, and paltry subsidies paid to local allies. “The United States would be wise to consider them today,” he concluded. Again, Beardon was writing just as the U.S. was beginning its adventure in Afghanistan, and when the war in Iraq based on lies was still a twinkle in Dick Cheney’s eye.

Does Obama, often described as lacking knowledge of foreign affairs, and praised (by all the wrong people) for reaching out to (all the wrong) “experienced” foreign policy wonks, really believe that he can succeed in Afghanistan where so many others have failed?

Here perhaps we find the audacity of sheer historical ignorance. The audacity of hope that “Yes, we can”–with a center-right Democratic administration, better than a far-right Republican administration–sufficiently stabilize Afghanistan to achieve the primary U.S. (imperialist) objectives in the region.

Obama seems to believe that the U.S. can defeat those resisting the foreign presence and its local allies, stabilize the thoroughly corrupt Northern Alliance warlord regime with Hamid Karzai as its symbolic head, and stem the flow of Taliban back and forth across the Pakistan border. Most importantly, it can finally get that oil pipeline done–the one that’s to run from the Caspian Sea through Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the Indian Ocean bypassing Russia and unfriendly Iran. The deal was signed in December 2002 but construction has been stymied by the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. That pipeline is, I believe, the big prize.

The war on Iraq has been in my opinion less “a war for oil” actually promoted by Big Oil than a war engineered by neoconservative ideologues to reconfigure Southwest Asia for long-term U.S. and Israeli geopolitical advantage. But it’s, in fact, been disastrous for the interests of U.S. imperialism, and bitterly divided the ruling class. It’s produced the highly unusual situation where one faction of that class has bet its money on an African-American named Barack Hussein Osama (accused of “socialism” by his right wing critics) to rectify the situation. While I don’t expect a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq under what will in fact be a center-right administration, the focus will be on the competition for control over Central Asian oil and gas. That means a degree of control over Afghanistan that has eluded Washington since the invasion of 2001.

In the view of the faction of hawks Obama represents, the Iraq War has been a colossal distraction from the Afghan War. The problem isn’t just that Bush diverted troops to Iraq “before we got bin Laden” or wiped out all the remnants of al-Qaeda, a group notoriously difficult to quantify or even define. The problem is that he used 9-11 for one purpose rather than another. He used the toppling of the Taliban to seque into Iraq rather than to rigorously pursue the agenda for U.S. hegemony over Central Asia centering around control of Caspian Sea oil and gas.

Obama presumably wants to go back in in force and do Afghanistan properly. That doesn’t necessarily mean wiping out the Taliban mentality that (say) requires women to wear burqas (that mentality is, after all, pre-Taliban and not so different from the mentality prevalent in societies such as Saudi Arabia whose governments are pro-U.S.). The U.S. and ISAF don’t need to produce a social revolution to maintain permanent bases (encircling China) or to construct and protect a pipeline providing privileged access to oil and natural gas. All they need to do is maintaining a puppet regime with minimal authority and establish a sufficient level of stability to attain such objectives.

But even that is proving a highly difficult undertaking. Thus Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, British ambassador to Afghanistan, reportedly told the duputy French ambassador to Kabul François Fitou in September 2008, “The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them … They are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis, which will probably be dramatic… In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan … The American strategy is doomed to fail.” These are observations by a top diplomat of the nation most deeply invested alongside the U.S. in the Afghan War. He proposed replacing president Karzai with “an acceptable dictator.” The top British military commander in Afghanistan agrees; Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith stated in October, “We’re not going to win this war.”

Karzai himself has repeatedly protested the high civilian casualty rate as a result of U.S. bombing; has called for negotations with the Taliban for an end to the insurgency, even (over U.S. objections) agreeing to insure Mullah Omar a safe-conduct should he agree to participate in talks in the country; and (although this has attracted little press attention) called for a firm deadline for foreign troops’ withdrawal. “This war has gone on for seven years;” he observed in a statement last month, “the Afghans don’t understand any more how come a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks.”

While the supposedly sovereign leader of Afghanistan–this puppet who seems to chafe at his puppet role–is talking like this, Obama and what will soon be his generals are planning a drastic increase in foreign forces with no deadline for their withdrawal. (By the way: Afghanistan is scheduled to hold a presidential election in October 2009, and Afghan-American neocon politician Zalmay Khalilzad, one-time UNOCAL executive, Afghan kingmaker in 2002, former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the UN, may well be a candidate.)

Obama wants to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, a real war for oil in the guise of “the war on terror.” The unfinished job’s been easy so far, requiring only 629 U.S. troops’ lives (up 154 so far this year from 117 in 2007, 98 in 2006), and an additional 410 lives of allied troops. But the blood and treasure spilt in Afghanistan was a key factor in the collapse of the once-mighty Soviet Union. As Obama orders his troops into that graveyard, how will the empire, reeling from crises unprecedented in many decades, respond? As the candidate of change and hope becomes the commander in chief of an escalating expanding war, how will his antiwar supporters rethink their politics?

“And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

In other words: Don’t worry, world. The bad old days of George Bush are over.

“To those — to those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you.”

In other words: Under my administration we Americans will continue to simplistically conceptualize the existence of an enemy that is pure evil and wants to destroy the world, and imagine we can “defeat” it through the War on Terror.

“To those who seek peace and security: We support you.”

In other words: You Georgians facing Russia. You Afghans facing Pakistan-based attacks. You Israelis facing what you imagine to be the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. You can trust an Obama administration to behave just like other recent U.S. administrations have behaved: with threats and sanctions, illegal cross-border raids and more war. Have no fear. As the world’s greatest imperialist country, with bases in over half the countries on the planet, we can seek peace and security and support whoever we want. Yes we can!

“And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”

In other words: For those of you who, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq based on lies, and the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and secret prisons around the world wonder if America’s beacon still burns bright, my election shows our greatness doesn’t come from our military and money but from…my ability to get enough money to get elected during an unpopular war!

Or more properly, the ’60s and early ’70s: that era shaped by an unpopular imperialist war and massive social movements demanding racial and gender equality. The antiwar and civil rights movements mobilized millions and influenced everybody. Without the gains of those years, arguably, a black man would not be leading in a presidential race today. The public would not reject the Iraq War as a wrong war based on lies but rather rally around the flag, trusting the leaders.

John McCain has built a political career on one episode in his life: his plane was shot down in October 1967 as he was bombing a power plant in a heavily populated area of Hanoi. (In 1995 the Vietnamese government estimated that two million North Vietnamese civilians died during the war, mainly due to such bombing.) His downed plane landed in Truc Bach Lake, and his life was saved by a Vietnamese civilian. The Vietnamese, realizing the McCain came from a distinguished military family, granted him special medical treatment although he had suffered no mortal injuries. He was held as a POW to 1973. During that time he publicly praised his captors for providing him “very good medical treatment.” While he has claimed to be the victim of torture, and claimed his statements acknowledging war crimes were forced, he has also opposed the release of his government debriefing that might shed light on these subjects. He was reportedly bound by ropes, and subjected to beatings during his confinement. But no one has suggested he was terrorized by attack dogs, sexually humiliated, water boarded or subjected to the refined torture tactics used in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. It is doubtful that his treatment would fit the Bush administration’s current (very narrow) definition of torture.

Somehow McCain’s been able to parlay this history into a reputation as a “war hero” whose faith in God and country kept him strong against his evil “gook” captors. This is the account the mainstream media accepts, as it accepts and promotes the idea that somehow McCain is “strong on national security.” Up until recently polls showed the public generally buying this line, however logically inconsistent it may be with the general assessment of the Vietnam War as a “mistake” if not a crime. How can you be a “war hero” in a war that was so unheroic and so wrong?

Bill Ayers represents an era of widespread outrage at American imperialism, including in the U.S. itself—an era of deep division unparalleled since the Civil War. An era McCain and his right-wing fringe running-mate would like to forget or undo. They see nothing wrong in the Vietnam War except for a lack of will to win. The ’60s “protesters” for them were a genus of traitors, whose very right to protest was somehow being defended by those bombing Hanoi. If the communists weren’t stopped in Vietnam, they argued, they’d be invading the west Coast. Rational people see this argument as highly stupid now.

Three years after McCain was shot down over Hanoi while on that bombing mission, Ayers by his own admission participated in a bombing of a New York City police station, and went on to bomb the Capitol and Pentagon in the next two years. Each action came in response to a specific escalation of the Vietnam War. There were no casualties, and Ayers was never convicted of a crime. He denies that the bombings were acts of terrorism and points out instead that the war in Vietnam was a war of terror. (During this time, by the way, the 11 to 13 year old Obama was living in Indonesia and Hawai’i.)

Bill Ayers like many of his generation was a follower of Martin Luther King before joining the SDS then some of its spin-offs which (like many in the New Left) parted company with the doctrinaire non-violence they perceived as ineffectual. But consider his background. While studying at the University of Michigan in 1965, he joined a picket line protesting an Ann Arbor pizzeria’s policy of refusing service to African-Americans. (18 years later, when I studied at UM, such racist exclusion was unimaginable. How the world had changed because of people like Ayers!) He participated in a draft board sit-in, punished by 10 days in jail. He worked in progressive childhood education. These are the kind of rebellious activities that enraged the white supremacists (then far more respectable and mainstream than now), the knee-jerk anticommunists, the reactionaries terrified by rock ‘n roll and the youth counterculture. But what’s there to damn here, for those who aren’t misled by a washed-up generation of racist uptight bigots?

People over 50 remember that period very well, and many much younger people view it with envy and fascination. After all, today’s youth listen to the Beatles, Stones, Doors, Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, considering them their own. (We in the ’60s rarely listened to the music of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s.) College students flock to courses on the ’60s, viewing that decade as one of turmoil, excitement, and progressive change. The verdict’s in: the war was wrong, segregation and all racism was wrong, sexism and homophobia were wrong—and the limited social progress as we’ve seen since the ’60s is largely rooted in the tireless efforts of the activists of that decade. The ’60s were good!

But McCain doesn’t see it that way. Nor does Sarah Palin. She of course is 44 years old, but obviously atypical of her generation. There’s no reason you can’t be the popular governor of a state of 676,987 while expressing contempt for such ’60s fixtures as “community organizers,” sexual liberation and the questioning of wars of aggression. Palin, the lipstick-painted pit-bull, has chosen to attack Ayers as a “terrorist” decades after the demise of the Weather Underground, after he’s become a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and received a Citizen of the Year award (1997) from the city of Chicago for his work on education reform. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of the infamous Mayor Daley who ordered the police attack on antiwar protesters at the Democratic Convention in 1968), who regularly consults Ayers on school issues, says: “He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally.” But for Palin, he’s a terrorist, present-tense.

Now, no honest person can actually suggest that Obama’s association with Ayers, dating from 1995 when Ayers hosted a fund-raising event for Obama in his living room and including service on the board of the philanthropic Woods Fund of Chicago (along with several Republican business executives from 2001) constitutes “palling around with terrorists.” Journalists from a variety of publications have concluded that Obama had at most a friendly casual acquaintance with a man he knew as a liberal activist. Even “palling around with former terrorists” would be a dubious charge, but that qualifier would weaken the McCain-Palin smear-job effort so Ayer and his wife Bernadine Dohrn become, for campaign purposes, lifetime terrorists

McCain and Palin say “we need to know the full extent” of the Obama-Ayers “relationship”–so we can know if Obama “is telling the truth to the American people or not.” The fact is, of course, that the politically careful Obama has steered clear of Ayers since January 2005 when he took his Senate seat. So what do they want to know? How many times the two men met on the street in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where both live? How many times Obama visited Ayers’ house? Do we need to know the content of their conversations?

Obviously with her “palling around with terrorists” remark Palin wants to set voters’ imaginations working. What does she want them to imagine? Obama patting Ayers on the back, saying “Good job on that Pentagon bombing, Bill”? Maybe. Recall the famous July 21, 2008 New Yorker cover, showing Obama in Muslim dress, fist-bumping Michelle sporting an Afro and AK-47, American flag burning in the fireplace, Osama bin Laden picture on the wall. It was “satire” supposedly, but in a country where 11% believe Obama is a Muslim (Newsweek poll, May 2008), and one-third believe U.S. Muslims are sympathetic to al-Qaeda (USA/Gallop August 2006) that sort of image, and Palin’s kind of language, can be poisonous.

“This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” Palin declared earlier this month to a select crowd of people who in her words “see America as the greatest force for good in this world… [a] beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy…” (Has she read the international polls about how this country is really perceived nowadays?)

Maybe, in fact, Obama doesn’t see America precisely as she does; he seems, after all, more aware of the real world in general. Unfortunately, with his plans to escalate the hopeless counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, provoke further confrontation along the border with Pakistan, and support the strike on Iran favored by his top Middle East advisor and the Israel Lobby, he sees America all too much as do McCain and Palin: through the eyes of an imperialist.

His campaign ads make clear, lest anyone might doubt, that Bill Ayers will have no role in his administration. Colin Powell, on the other hand, might. This is the Colin Powell who, as an Army Major in 1968, six months after the My Lai Massacre charged with investigating charges of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, dismissed them blithely declaring “relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” That was his ’60s, as McCain’s ’60s were his glory days bombing those Vietnamese people.

For many of us, the antiwar movement of that time remains a cherished memory. So too the Freedom Rides, the marches on Washington. The counterculture. The Stonewall Riots of June 1969. That groundswell of necessary rebellion in this country that dovetailed with the near-revolutionary upsurge in Europe in 1968 and even the Cultural Revolution in China. Those ’60s–emblematic of all the subsequent challenges to mandatory “patriotism,” butt-headed religiosity, attacks upon science, criminalization of inner-city youth under the guise of the “War on Drugs,” resurgent assaults on women’s rights–is the real focus of the attack on Ayers, and through him on Obama.

What sort of political operative sits behind a desk, weighing options, decides, “Ok, let’s go with this Ayers thing?” The sort of operative who imagines that the base can best be energized by a frontal attack on the ’60s. The sort of Rovian manipulator who calculates that the ideal simple-minded voter seeing Atta in Ayers will see Osama in Obama. If one can exploit Islamophobia to conflate al-Qaeda with Iraq with Yassir Arafat with Hizbollah, one can exploit the lingering Republican bitterness at the ’60s and revolutionary possibilities that era represents to confer an aura of radicalism around the Democratic presidential candidate.

He surely doesn’t deserve it. But neither does he necessarily suffer from it. For many of us, the ’60s were and remain a time of youthful exuberance and idealism, sincere questioning of received wisdom, righteous resistance to obvious lies, institutional racism and vicious immoral war. By all means, Ms. Palin, raise that specter, and see what good it does you!

This is heavy stuff. But this news got sidelined by the star coverage conferred by the mainstream media on Sarah Palin, whose ringing oration, dripping with ignorance and contempt for the world, brought down the house Wednesday night in that celebration of stupidity in St. Paul. That speech, authored by George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully for whatever vice presidential candidate McCain selected, asserted among other things that Bush’s “surge” had prevented al-Qaeda from taking over Iraq. The message is clear: all U.S. military action is designed to protect the U.S. from al-Qaeda terror.

Why would the mainstream media, pronouncing “a star is born,” want to highlight the little news story about remote Waziristan? Palin was splashed all over the front page of the Boston Globe on Thursday; the Pakistan story was on page A-3. On Friday a follow-up AP story made page A-26. It emphasized how the raid had “complicated life for presidential front-runner Asif Ali Zardari.”

But this largely ignored event holds potentially horrifying significance. “Top American officials” have told the New York Times that this raid “could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.” The plan of course enjoys the support of John McCain, who never met a warlike action he didn’t like, as well as his opponent in the presidential race. Barack Obama has been saying for over a year that is the U.S. has “actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan and the chance to hit them, it should do so. The hell with Pakistani sovereignty! Why should such a detail matter after “we were attacked”?

Why should the outraged opposition of the Pakistani government constitute a major news story? Pakistan’s only a nuclear-armed Muslim country of 165 million people, which has at great cost to itself agreed–under duress, indeed the threat of being “bombed back into the Stone Age”—to abet U.S. objectives in neighboring Afghanistan. It’s just a country that having helped create and nurture the Taliban in order to stabilize Afghanistan, broke with that organization at the demand of the U.S. in 2001 and then found its frontier provinces flooded with Islamist militants fleeing across the border.

According to a White House “fact sheet” issued in August 2007:

• Pakistan has worked closely with the United States to secure the arrest of terrorists like Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al Shibh. Pakistan has killed or captured hundreds of suspected and known terrorists, including Mullah Obaidullah, who ranked second in the Taliban hierarchy at the time of his capture.
• About 100,000 Pakistani troops are deployed in the region near the Afghan border, and hundreds of Pakistani security forces have given their lives in the battle to combat terrorism post-9/11.
• Pakistan provides vital logistical support to coalition forces in Afghanistan.
• President Musharraf has a comprehensive strategy that combines three critical components–strengthened governance, increased economic development, and improved security–aimed at eradicating extremism in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

No government has provided more assistance to Washington as it pursues its goals in Southwest Asia. No country has been more dramatically destabilized as the price of its cooperation. But not only does the U.S. political class take this disasterous compliance for granted, it wants to further emphasize Islamabad’s irrelevance by attacking the border area at will. It insults the sensibilities of a population that holds bin Laden in far greater esteem than the U.S. president. It provokes the powerful Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), originally the creation of the CIA, once a close partner with the U.S. in the project of destroying the secular pro-Soviet state that existed in Afghanistan from 1978 to 1993. (The ISI, a power unto itself, is already annoyed that Afghanistan, where anti-Indian Kashmiri jihadis used to hone their skills in training camps, has been cozying up to India.) Its embrace undermines any leader who seeks nationalist and religious credentials in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

“There’s potential to see more [attacks on Pakistan],” an unnamed U.S. official told the New York Times. Who do these people think they’re dealing with?

It is one thing to ignore the government of Iraq, placed in power by the U.S. invasion, when it says no to a permanent U.S. military presence, U.S. forces’ immunity from Iraqi law, or the privatization of Iraq’s petroleum resources. It’s one thing to laugh at al-Maliki & Co. and say, “Well, they don’t mean that,” confident that they’ll eventually knuckle under. It’s another thing to suppose that the Pakistanis, when they say “No,” mean anything other than “No” and will simply burn with quiet resentment indefinitely as U.S. forces violate their sovereignty. But that sort of insane arrogance stems naturally from the post 9-11 “us vs. them” mentality of U.S. leaders. Not just the neocons, mind you, but the entire political mainstream.

Pakistan, these leaders will note, is not doing enough to prevent militants from crossing over the border to attack U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. One should respond to this assertion with the following points:

1. The U.S. is conflating Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. But these are not the same thing. (This is perhaps the most obvious but obviously neglected point of fact in the post 9-11 ear.) The Taliban is an indigenous Afghan movement and–however unsavory–unquestionably enjoys a social base. Al-Qaeda is a mostly Arab force rooted in the U.S.-sponsored anti-Soviet Mujahadeen of the 1980s.

2. Nobody in Afghanistan asked the U.S. to invade, bomb, or continue bombing Afghanistan for seven years. Nor did the Pakistanis.

3. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, against the advice and will of Pakistan, and the failure of that invasion to crush al-Qaeda, pushed al-Qaeda and Taliban forces into Pakistan. It’s likely the latter far outnumber the former.

4. Pakistan’s government had never firmly controlled the frontier provinces or deployed large-scale military forces there in deference to the sensibilities of local tribes. Washington, oblivious to Pakistan’s realities, demanded that Islamabad suppress the al-Qaeda and Taliban forces that fled into the region. In effect, it demanded that Pakistan clean up a mess that the U.S. invasion had created.

5. Pakistan’s efforts to obey Washington have taken a terrible toll on the Pakistani Army, solidified local resistance to the central government, and in fact produced a Pakistani Taliban rooted in the local Pashtuns who identify with the Afghan Pashtuns and have no use for the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan drawn by colonialists who never consulted with them in drawing the map.

6. Faced with the prospect of a general tribal-based rebellion, Islamabad has cut deals with local Taliban-linked groups. Washington has expressed its disapproval, claiming such deals continue to allow militants to cross back and forth across the border attacking its forces and their allies in Afghanistan. Washington is, in effect, asking Pakistan’s government to risk civil war and its own collapse to prevent Afghans from attacking its forces in Afghanistan whose deployment Pakistan opposed in the first place.

7. Washington is saying to this nuclear power, Pakistan: “You must obey!” And some in Pakistan are saying: “You do not know this region. You’ve responded to 9-11 by lashing out in all directions, creating enemies you never had before. You created this problem, our headache, in Waziristan and adjoining regions. And you make it worse by saying that since we’re not handling it to your satisfaction, you’re going to start landing your troops in our villages, shooting on our civilians. And you’re expecting us to say, ‘Ok, no problem, boss?’ You’re crazy.”

It is crazy, even for a cocky hyper-imperialist power, to manifest such arrogance and contempt. Such attacks on Pakistan say to the Muslims of the world: “You are the problem and we reserve the right to slaughter you, because back home, we have powerful politicians who respond to a mass base that thinks fighting you all is, as Sarah Palin put it, ‘a task from God.’ (USA! USA! USA! USA!) If you don’t agree with our program to restructure your region, supporting our misogynistic fanatical Islamists in the Northern Alliance as opposed to the Taliban misogynistic fanatical Islamists you used to sponsor, we’ll invade you and take care of the problem ourselves. (USA! USA! USA! USA!) Get used to it. It’s not just the Bush crowd. We’ve got Obama on board now too. We will strike Pakistani targets as we see fit. Screw international law, which we invoke when it serves our needs and ignore when it might restrain us. Nobody is allowed to cross any border to attack our brave Americans, no matter where we invade, or why. Just accept that, world, and avoid our wrath. (USA! USA! USA!)”

That’s indeed the message to Pakistan. If there were a free press in this country, honest education and genuine discussion, the people would recoil in horror from the crimes committed in their name and the premises–largely lies–behind those crimes. But we have none of that, just some posts on the internet. The outlook is grim.

I will tell you having visited Israel just a month and a half ago, their general attitude is, ‘We will not allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon.’ My job as president would be to try to make sure we are tightening the screws diplomatically on Iran, that we mobilize the world community to go after Iran’s nuclear program in a serious way. … We have to do it before Israel feels its back is against the wall.

– Barack Obama, August 25, 2008

The candidate of “change,” having just selected the ultimate Washington insider as his running mate, again makes clear how thoroughly he embraces the Lobby and the foreign policy establishment.

He might have said:

Well, as I understand it, the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which represents the consensus of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies including the CIA, stated with a high degree of confidence that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. Some Bush administration officials, especially those around Vice President Cheney, act as though they know that there is one and it threatens the whole world. But they’ve pulled that act before, haven’t they?–scaring us all about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction which, it turned out, didn’t exist.

I visited Israel a month and a half ago, and I know there are some people there who see Iran as their main enemy. They’d like the U.S. to bomb Iran. But I frankly question their judgment. My foreign policy will be based upon my administration’s assessment of America’s interests, which do not include antagonizing more Muslim nations or reinforcing the perception that the U.S. gives Israel everything it wants, even as it ceaselessly expands illegal settlements on the occupied West Bank and— lets’s speak frankly—treats Palestinians as blacks in South Africa were treated under apartheid.

I’d like to remind you that in the summer of 2003 the Iranian government through the Swiss ambassador to Tehran proposed talks with the U.S. The Iranians were willing to exchange support for the Arab League proposal for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, withdrawal of military support for Hamas and Hizbollah, and resolution of U.S. concerns about its nuclear program in exchange for normalized diplomatic and trade relations with the U.S. Although Secretary of State Colin Powell was interested in the offer, Vice President Cheney rejected it out of hand. The initiative was not even reported in the press at the time.

We need to revisit that moment. We need to engage the Iranians. We need to question the neocon propaganda machine which, having circulated so much disinformation about Iraq is now doing the same about Iran. We need to call these guys out on their fear-mongering, their wild references to World War III and a ‘nuclear holocaust.’ Some say we need to ‘tighten the screws’ diplomatically. But we really need to question the premises behind the sanctions we’ve enacted to date. There hasn’t been any debate in this country about how to relate to Iran. It hasn’t been possible, politically, to say: ‘Maybe Iran is not a threat to U.S. security.’ It hasn’t been popular to point out the obvious: Iran supports the al-Maliki government in Iraq, just as we do, and the Karzai government in Afghanistan, just as we do.

Rational analysts point out that even if the entire U.S. intelligence community is wrong, and Iran is poised to acquire nuclear weapons soon, it wouldn’t use them against Israel. Iran is a long ways from Israel, has no territorial issues with Israel, no national interest in attacking Israel. Reports of anti-Semitism in Iran appear exaggerated, for political reasons. (Iran’s Jewish community is the largest outside of Israel in the Middle East and has representation in the Iranian parliament.) Israel unlike Iran is a nuclear power. Unlike Iran it hasn’t signed the Nonproliferation Treaty and refuses IAEA inspections. It has about 200 nuclear weapons that could respond to an Iranian attack with apocalyptic ferocity.

Frankly I think the Israeli leaders are hypocritical in saying that they ‘can’t allow’ Iran to get a nuclear weapon. Whoever allowed them to get theirs? They may feel that their backs are against the wall, but how do you suppose the Iranians feel, when the Bush administration has been saying for years it reserves the right to attack them, even using nukes?

Advocates of a ‘preemptive’ attack on Iran charge that Iranians are somehow suicidal, irrational, willing to suffer millions of deaths of their countrymen in order to annihilate Israel. But this is an irrational and indeed racist characterization of the Iranian people.

My job as president will be to make a clean break with the Bush administration’s foreign policy based on lies and fear-mongering. I would do our Israeli friends no favor if I capitulated to the propaganda and paranoia and continued this disastrous neocon strategy of regime change throughout the Middle East. I stand for change in foreign policy, change in how we think about foreign relations. I stand for mutual respect and dialogue, not the arrogance of the Bush White House summed up in Cheney’s statement, ‘we don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it.’

We have to humbly understand that many people around this world think the United States is evil–for going to war and killing hundreds of thousands for no good reason. We need to understand that Iranians and Russians a whole lot of other folks think their backs are up against the wall because of reckless, provocative U.S. actions. As the candidate of change, I repudiate the strategy of aggression and culture of lies that have undermined American democracy. I ask you to vote for me as the candidate of peace.

Of course he can’t do that. Because in this “democracy” his hands are tied. No powerful news editor in the mainstream media, employed by General Electric, Time-Warner, Murdoch, Verizon or Disney would treat such a statement as anything other than an expression of wild-eyed leftwing extremism (if not anti-Semitism). Real debate is not possible outside the catacombs of the internet. It’s an iron law of the system: any candidate of change, having acquired an enthusiastic mass base through the raising of false hopes, has to at some point become the standard-bearer of the status quo. The candidate flushed with victory cynically expects serious supporters to stay on board the program—even as the program looses all but symbolic and rhetorical content.

The ultimate message: Voting for me is the best you can do. Forget any immediate withdrawal from Iraq, which I see as a strategic blunder, but not a war crime. Forget any rapprochement with Iran, or rethinking of Middle East policy, because I, like my vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, am intimidated by the Israel Lobby. Settle for a Bush Lite administration—no surprises, nothing radical, more troops to the real war in Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan.

This is a country of 300 million people, many of us really paying attention to events. We’re presented with a choice. One presidential candidate who’s unable to answer a question about how many homes he owns; states publicly that Iran is supporting al-Qaeda; and surrounds himself with neocon advisors who want a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, want to bomb Iran, and want to provoke conflict with Russia. Another candidate (there being two, under our system) who boasts that he opposed the Iraq War but hedges on the issue of withdrawal, talks hawkish on Afghanistan, threatens to assault Pakistan, wants to “further isolate Russia,” and keeps an Iran attack “on the table” because he thinks Israel’s back is against the wall.

In fact it’s we, the American people, who have our backs against the wall. The screws are tightening on us—we who get screwed every four years, routinely. The candidate of “change” and the candidate of “country” stand together in pledging allegiance to a conception of reality the Israel Lobby endlessly promotes although it clashes at every turn with the actual world. Candidates cannot say what needs to be said.

There is something fundamentally wrong here. We are in one of those “times of universal deceit” in which, as George Orwell put it, “telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” You just can’t do it if you’re running for election, urging the masses to observe the voting rite, demanding they cast their ballots as a statement of compliance and acceptance, while offering us such meager choice. If the goal were democracy, we could do so much better. There’s no way Obama’s going to be accused of being revolutionary, no way the Congress is going to investigate and punish the liars whose hands are covered in blood, no way the mainstream press is going to acknowledge near term what for so many of us are obvious truths. It falls to others to tell the truth and act against the universal deceit.

Saakashvili, in an effort to establish effective control over his whole country, sent troops into the breakaway region of South Ossetia August 7 (just before the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing). Russia used this as an excuse to flex its muscle, invading a country for the first time since the USSR invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. It not only drove Georgian troops from South Ossetia but along with allies in the separatist Abkhazia region attacked targets throughout Georgia. It’s a clear case of unwarranted aggression.

This narrative has been effectively challenged or at least contextualized in columns by Charles King in the Christian Science Monitor, Brendan O’Neill on Spiked, and Justin Raimondo on Antiwar.com, among others. Here I’d like to list some of their main points, along with some historical background:

1. Saakashvili, who owes his position to U.S. interference in Georgian politics, is no liberal democrat but an autocrat who jails political enemies and media critics and uses force to quash anti-government demonstrations. He accuses foes of coup plots which he equates with “aiding terrorism.”

2. Russia is alarmed at the unceasing expansion of NATO, an alliance formed to secure western Europe against a Soviet attack that never happened. Russian leaders expected NATO to dissolve along with the Warsaw Pact at the end of the Cold War. Instead it has expanded to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1997 and Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004. Inclusion of the Baltic states brings NATO right up to the Russian border. Washington is pushing for the eventual inclusion of Ukraine (another country where Washington has been meddling politically) and Georgia in the alliance. Russia has repeatedly warned that it can not tolerate this.

3. The whole of Georgia was part of the Russian Empire from 1801, and was absorbed into the USSR in 1922. It became independent with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the Soviet period, South Ossetia and Abkhazia (as well as the Adjara region) had autonomous status within the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Use of the native languages was encouraged by the state and South Ossetians, Abkhazis, and Adjaris favored over Georgians or Russians for bureaucratic posts in their regions. In the last couple years of the USSR, new laws imposing the Georgian language nationwide and banning regional-based political parties caused South Ossetians to declare a Soviet Democratic Republic. In 1991 polls showed that they overwhelmingly favored the preservation of the Soviet Union and opposed integration into a new Georgian state. At the time Georgian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia called South Ossetian separatists “direct agents of the Kremlin, its tools and terrorists.”

In 1992 the new regime of Eduard Shevardnadze in post-Soviet Georgia announced its intention to restore a 1921 constitution stripping these regions of autonomy. In response the South Ossetians conducted a referendum, voting overwhelmingly for independence. Violence in the region drew Russian concern and in June, after hundreds had died, Tblisi agreed to the creation of a tripartite peace-keeping force of Russians, Georgians and South Ossetians in the region. The following month Abkhazia proclaimed itself independent, and Tblisi sent 3000 troops into the poorly defended region and engaged in wanton destruction. The majority in both regions apparently want a divorce from Georgia and either independence or incorporation into the Russian Federation. In 2002 South Ossetia’s elected president, Eduard Kokoity, officially requested that Moscow recognize the Republic of South Ossetia and its absorption into the Russian Federation.

4. While Vladimir Putin was president, Russia conferred citizenship and passports on most South Ossetians and can thus argue that it has an obligation to defend them from aggression. Russia can also argue that it has an obligation to defend its peace-keeping troops from attack.

5. Saakashvili has cultivated an alliance with the U.S., even supplying the third largest detachment of troops (2000) to the “Coalition forces” in Iraq. (Georgia has only a population of 4.7 million people.) The Georgian Army has been trained by U.S. and Israeli forces. Saakashvili has sought membership in NATO, depicting Georgia as a European democracy confronted with a bullying undemocratic neighbor. Moscow finds Saakasvili’s rhetoric provocative.

6. While the MSM has depicted the Georgia crisis as the result of Russian aggression, the initial large-scale military action was a surprise aerial attack on the regional capital of Tskhinvali on August 7 followed up by a tank and mortar assault August 8. This produced a prompt Russian military response. However, it does not appear to have been planned well in advance. A senior U.S. official told the New York Times, “It doesn’t look like this was premeditated, with a massive staging of equipment. Until the night before the fighting, Russia seemed to be playing a constructive role [in maintaining peace between Tblisi and the Ossetians].”

7. Georgia plays an important role in the geopolitics of oil, since the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline completed 2005 passes through it, connecting the Caspian Sea oil fields to NATO member Turkey, bypassing Russia. Many Russian officials feel it an effort to diminish Russian influence in the Caucasus and justify the stationing of U.S. troops in the region. It may be that Saakashvili believed Georgia so valuable to the U.S. bloc, because of the pipeline, military cooperation and political allegiance, that he could assault South Ossetia counting on the U.S. to restrain any Russian response. But as the MSM reports, a U.S. military response is highly unlikely.

8. The Russians have justified their actions by making pointed references to U.S. actions in recent years. In February, when the U.S. recognized the Serbian breakaway province of Kosovo, split off from then-Yugoslavia by a NATO bombing campaign in 1999, the Russians denounced the move. They stated that the U.S.-led attack (the first war in Europe, including the first aerial attack on a national capital, since 1945) and the detachment of part of a sovereign state, ostensibly to protect an ethnic group, was a dangerous precedent. One can thus read the Russian actions of the last week as a tit-for-tat response to the arrogant use of American power in Russia’s immediate backyard.

I wrote after Kosovo’s U.S.-backed declaration of independence six months ago:

[The Russians’] opposition to Kosovo’s independence might be perceived as a slight irritation in Washington among those eager to establish a new client-state and drag it into NATO. But this move comes on the heels of U.S. meddling in Georgia, Belarus, and the Ukraine, the relentless eastward expansion of NATO, and moves to locate missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russian government is in effect saying: “Look, you intervene at will in Latin America, forming and toppling governments as you will, arguing it’s necessary for your ‘national security.’ We who have been invaded many times from the west have legitimate reasons to support our friends in the Balkans, including the Serbs whom you’ve maligned and mistreated disgracefully. Do you really think you can just wrench away a province from a Slavic country friendly to us, through brutal military force, and expect us to take it lying down?” I have the feeling that Washington blew it here–and that there will be some blowback.

Here’s indeed some blowback. The Georgian regime is humiliated, and Washington embarrassingly impotent to go to Saakashvili’s aid. Quite likely the young president’s constituents will turn on him, shocked by the utter folly of his provoking the Russian bear.

And the MSM take will be: Russia is flexing its muscles, secure in the knowledge that Europe needs its oil and natural gas and so the West cannot prevent its bullying antidemocratic actions. Some will call it a new Cold War. But don’t expect much genuine historical analysis.

The parallel between Kosovo and South Ossetia is not of course exact. Kosovo plays a more important role in Serbian history than South Ossetia in Georgian history. It experienced a far more dramatic ethno-demographic change in the last century and a half than South Ossetia. (A 1871 report by an Austrian officer indicates that Kosovo was 64% Serb, 32% Albanian, whereas the Kosovars are now 92% of the total.) Serbs can protest that the mere reproduction rate of Albanians in Kosovo shouldn’t have entitled the Kosovars to seize the Serbian heartland with its churches, monasteries and battlefields rich in heroic historical memory. I don’t think Georgians can make a similar argument about South Ossetia; the Ossetians (who may be related to Iranians) seem to have predominated in the region since around the fourteenth century.

The premise for the U.S./NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was that Kosovars were being persecuted by Serbian authorities. U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen declared, “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing… They may have been murdered,” while a State Department spokesman warned, “There are indications genocide is unfolding in Kosovo.” (One thinks of the Russian accusation of “genocide” as it was reported 1500-2000 Ossetian civilians had been killed in the Georgian attack.) Actually it turns out only about 2000 civilians were killed in Kosovo between 1998 and 1999–around the number of South Ossetians killed by Georgians in just a few days. (To put this into perspective, there are about 100,000 South Ossetians in a region measuring 3,900 square kilometers and about two million inhabitants of Kosovo measuring 11,000 square kilometers.) A German court determined in March 1999 that, “Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have neither been nor are now exposed to regional or countrywide group persecution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” Does it not look as though the premise of persecution justifying outside intervention is much stronger in the South Ossetia case?

Before commencing the bombardment of Yugoslavia (again, the first such bombardment in Europe since World War II), the U.S. presented Belgrade with the “Rambouillet Accords” ultimatum: either allow NATO forces to operate at will and tax-free throughout the entire territory of Yugoslavia (once proudly non-aligned during the Cold War), while they secured Kosovo as Yugoslav federal troops withdrew–or be subject to attack. The U.S. made demands no sovereign state could accept. Russia in contrast has not demanded the right to move its troops at will throughout Georgia. It gave Tblisi no ultimatum before responding to what appears to have been a brutal sneak attack.

NATO bombed Belgrade for three months in 1999. The bombing of the Serb Radio and Television (RTS) headquarters in Belgrade on April 23 killed 16 RTS civilian technicians. Russia has reportedly attacked the Vaziani military airbase outside Tbilisi and military targets in the capital city to “punish” Georgia for the South Ossetia attack and, no doubt, its embrace of an unofficial military alliance threatening to Russia. Perhaps if the proposed cease-fire does not hold, Tblisi will encounter the same fate as Belgrade. But I think it more likely that the Georgian authorities will capitulate immediately to the invaders’ demands, which are more measured than the demands presented Milosevic.

Regardless of these differences between Kosovo and South Ossetia, Moscow seems to be saying: You cannot violate international law with your constant aggressions and provocations of Russia–a country seeking warm ties with the U.S. and Europe–without expecting us, at some point, to respond in kind. You cannot say it’s fine, as a “special exception” to violate the sovereignty of our traditional Serbian allies by delivering a state to the Kosovars while damning us for invading Georgia to defend the Ossetians. You have created this problem, and more to come.

Saakashvili explains Russia’s actions by saying, “They just don’t want freedom and that’s why they want to stamp on Georgia and destroy it.” The buffoon seems to echo Bush’s explanation for the 9-11 attacks: “They hate our freedoms.” Some see here the re-emergence of a Cold War, a pitting of democracy versus the specter of communist totalitarianism. Surely there are policy wonks nostalgic for the Cold War era and its simplicity. But it really has little to do with “freedom,” and we do not have here a clash of systems and ideologies. Russia is in its own way as capitalistic and imperialistic as the U.S. Rather, there’s a clash between those governing the U.S. and Russia, comparable to the inter-imperialist clashes and turf-battles of the past century and a half. Like those it has a lot to do with competition for the control of raw materials and markets. Within that big game, Russia suddenly seems much more competitive.